How to Read and Why (review)

Abstract

How to Read and Why is hardly Bloom's first attempt to engage a less professional audience. That attempt characterizes most of Bloom's criticism over the last fifteen or so years, beginning with the massive Chelsea House publishing venture, in which he composed introductions to collections of critical essays on every literary author, more or less. Since Chelsea House, Bloom has produced three best-sellers, The Book of J, his commentary on the oldest strain of the Pentateuch, The Western Canon, and the magisterial Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. How to Read and Why in many ways resembles The Western Canon in miniature, but the reduction in size corresponds to a shift in stance and genre. The Western Canon presented itself as a work of mourning, an elegy for the great and increasingly disregarded masterpieces of the Western literary tradition, but the work itself was triumphal. Bloom celebrated a pantheon of twenty-six literary heroes while intermittently deriding the academic "resentniks" who cannot soar where the mighty dead are now sitting. By contrast, How to Read and Why really is elegiac, or feels so to me. But it is not so much an elegy for the canon as for the act of reading itself.