The Revisionary Company: Harold Bloom's "Last Romanticism"

Abstract

MY SENSE of Harold Bloom's critical importance would not alone seem enough to justify this essay since others have explicated the essentials of his revisionary poetics at substantial length--Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism (1980), Elizabeth Bruss's Beautiful Theories (1982), and Jean-Pierre Mileur's Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity (1985) are three examples that come immediately to mind. Despite their strength in other ways, however, these efforts seem to me finally to lack any real understanding of Bloom's project, any sense of its underlying significance. The same, I believe, can be said of certain influential forms of feminist criticism (most famously that of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar) which would posit against Bloom's so-called gender-restrictive Oedipal theory of literary relations a counterpatriarchal, noncombative, matriarchal tradition of women writers/ precursors. Focusing on the female literary tradition of the nineteenth century in their monumental The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979), Gilbert and Gubar aim to articulate a historical feminist poetics modeled on Bloom's patriarchal poetics of the male tradition. Instead of an of influence, female writers experience an of authorship --an anxiety and rage resulting from the confining backdrop of male literary authority which keep them from attaining literary autonomy. But as I shall argue in the following pages, Bloom's psychopoetic model not an Oedipal model. Nor does it constitute, as the critical consensus would have it, a fundamentally historical mode of interpretation. In a recent interview Frank Lentricchia reasserts his (influential) claim in After the New Criticism that in his revisionary tetralogy Bloom has put forth bold and important ideas which threaten to make the moribund subject of influence the pivot of the most satisfying historicism to appear in modern criticism.' Citing the historical, self-conscious sophistication of Bloom's theory, Lentricchia again maintains that it is the historicist character of his project that