Work Of Bloom Research Articles

Hyped or Transformational? AI in Higher Education

This paper explores the difference between the transformation idea and the reality of how colleges and universities leverage technologies for teaching, learning and assessment. We seek to understand why a structural and operational transformation of these institutions rarely happens and offer an understanding of the structural, operational, financial, and political constraints that prevent transformation but encourage continuous improvement. More specifically, we suggest that AI will not deliver on its promise to finally “solve” the so-called “two sigma” problem, which arises from the work of Bloom (1984), who showed that students taught through tutoring performed better by two standard deviations than those taught in a traditional classroom.

Bloom, Lisa E., (2022) Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic.

This review critically examines Lisa E. Bloom's Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics (2022) by studying the book’s key methodological and analytical approaches to contemporary visual art on the poles. I locate Bloom's work as part of a larger discourse on Ice Humanities and highlight her own contribution to the field by focusing on the book's reconfiguration of critical environmentalism through intersectional feminist, indigenous, and transnational frameworks. The review also discusses the dual role of aesthetics in both shaping hegemonic perceptions of the poles and in articulating strategies for their subversion.

‘Pointing the way’: Alex Bloom and A.S. Neill on the enduring necessity and enacted possibility of radical democratic education as ‘a method of life’

Abstract Prompted by the centenary of the founding of Summerhill, in my contribution to this JOPE Suite on Democratic Education, I briefly explore both the admiring reciprocity and the subsidiary but significant differences of praxis between A.S. Neill and Alex Bloom, two remarkable pioneers of education in and for participatory democracy as a way of life. Because A.S. Neill's work is internationally renowned and Alex Bloom's has yet to re-establish the worldwide recognition it had in his own lifetime, my emphasis is on the contribution of Alex Bloom, in large part because he is amongst the most radical pioneers of democratic education the UK state sector has ever known. To a significant degree, the aspirations and actualities of Bloom's work rebutted Neill's insistence that pioneers within the state sector of education could not innovate in ways that would significantly challenge the status quo. Indeed, Alex Bloom extended participatory democratic educational aspirations in ways which Neill did not. Most importantly, these not only entailed a commitment to community engagement, they did so in conditions of abject poverty and profound psychological trauma following the ravages of the Second World War London Blitz with its attendant evacuation and subsequent return to the ruins of their former homes. In the first section, I take as my starting point Alex Bloom's strongly supportive review of A.S. Neill's book The Problem Family and Neill's visit to Bloom's school in the East End of London, some five years later. Foregrounding the dialectic of practice and aspiration, I touch on some of the key issues that emerged for both Neill and Bloom at that time. Challenging Neill's later affirmation that the only significant freedom one can introduce into a state school is ‘a free attitude on the teacher's part, his or her being on the side of the child’ and his reported view that Bloom and others might be able to experiment in methods of teaching or ways of organising the timetable, ‘but not in methods of living’, the second section explores the nature and interrelationship of six key strands woven into the fabric of Alex Bloom's truly remarkable work that exemplified the grounded possibility and vibrant actuality of participatory democracy as a way of living and learning together that prefigures a more just, creative and caring form of human engagement. Locating the foundation of Alex Bloom's praxis within the 20th-century personalist philosophical tradition and its Adlerian psychological counterpart, the brief concluding section draws in particular on the work of John Macmurray who argues, as did Bloom in his own writing and his daily praxis, that ‘The first priority in education—if by education we mean learning to be human—is learning to live in personal relation to other people. Let us call it learning to live in community’.

Review: Architecture of the Islamic West: North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1800

Review: <i>Architecture of the Islamic West: North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1800</i>

Connective frequencies in child-directed texts

Abstract Starting from a usage-based perspective of language acquisition, the present study investigates the occurrence of connectives in BasiLex, an 11.5 million word corpus of texts Dutch children encounter during the primary school years (grades 1–6). Specifically, we investigate how connective frequencies change across grades, how these changes reflect the theorized orders of connective acquisition in the work of Bloom et al. (1980) and Evers-Vermeul &amp; Sanders (2009), and we make a comparison with the frequencies of connectives in the adult written language corpus Celex. Briefly summarized, our findings show that the numbers of connectives increase sharply after grade 1 and then more steadily across grades 2 to 6; we see some reflection of the connective acquisition theory of Evers-Vermeul &amp; Sanders in the connective frequencies in texts offered to children; and we see some remarkable similarities between connective frequencies in the adult corpus Celex as compared to connective frequencies in grade 1 and grade 6 texts in BasiLex. Our findings suggest that the written input offered to children harmonizes with theoretical approaches that emphasize the incremental growth of word knowledge in children as a function of exposure.

Drama and Bloom's Canon

Drama and Bloom's Canon Gina Masucci MacKenzie (bio) There is Shakespeare and then all the others. That seems to be Harold Bloom's barely unspoken commentary on drama since the Renaissance. Rarely does he comment on it, other than to extol Shakespeare's greatness, and then his commentary is clipped and a bit narrow sighted. This seems at odds with one of the most important literary critics of the contemporary errors and one of the greatest explicators of Shakespeare, in any time. What is it about most drama that limits Bloom's interaction with it? In particular, what about American drama diminishes Bloom's interest and respect? In Dramatists and Drama, a book still most notably devoted to the ancient Western and Renaissance dramatists, Bloom does a respectable job of covering many of the great male playwrights of American history: Miller, Simon, Albee, Stoppard, Shepard, Williams, Wilson, Mamet and Kushner. In his last great survey of American writers, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, he and editor David Mikics chose only to include commentary about O'Neill, Williams and Albee. Baldwin too is mentioned, but for his novels only, not his work for stage. It seems that Bloom's work on American drama is reflective, not only of his theory, but of the study of theory as a whole. Bloom provides a limited view of the American canon. The works represented are certainly great works, but there are so few of them and he reads them as literature, which is, at best, only half of what drama is. For Bloom, drama is rarified art in the American canon, a "shining city on a hill." Whether that city shines like a Christ, transfigured in Biblical stories, or a teenage vampire lounging in the woods in a Stephanie Meyers novel, doesn't matter. What matters is the accessibility of the exalted and the path one can take to join them. The image of America as a shining city on a hill can be traced back to John Winthrop's fire and brimstone preaching to his Puritanical followers. He reminded people of the exceptional status of the American colonies. With that exceptional status, he warned, came great responsibility. The spotlight not only highlights the good being done, but also the flaws. Winthrop, in his unflinching desire to intimidate his flock, emphasizes that those in the valley will look to the hill to see greatness, but are more likely to see degeneration, if there is any to be seen. The concept of the canon mimics that same pattern. Those held up as the gods of the literature are most easily those criticized and [End Page 455] those creating the canon are subject to the same fate. Mikics' introduction to The American Canon intimates this when he write, "Bloom, a lifelong man of the left, laments the dire politics that often results from the American taste for the unfettered, God-approved selfhood: self-absorbed greed, worship of power, the cult of masculine regeneration through violence" (2019, 8). Bloom is aware of the danger of using power and position, sometimes in the guise of religion, to assert primacy, but sometimes, seems unaware that he enacts that practice. As a public intellectual with a career of influential writing that spanned six decades, Bloom himself stands in the town square of theory, in the literary city on a hill. As critics, it is imperative to see his flaws, but also to recognize his greatness. From the very limited perspective of a theorist of Modern American drama, Bloom is deeply flawed. He either consciously, or unconsciously edits out his own influence and bias, while knowingly limiting drama to its written value, all but ignoring performance. He places Eugene O'Neill, an undeniable deservedly giant figure in American drama, at its pinnacle, writing, "[Y]et O'Neill, despite his many limitations, is the most American of our handful of dramatists who matter most: Williams, Miller, Wilder, Albee, Kushner, perhaps Mamet and Shepard" (Bloom 2019, 216). Interestingly, it seems to be O'Neill's own fraught relationship with his emotional and intellectual nemesis, New England Puritanism, that same tradition which builds the city on the hill. Here...

“The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins”: On Bloom's “Endlessly Elaborating Poem”

"The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins":On Bloom's "Endlessly Elaborating Poem" Chris Winkler (bio) In the closing pages of his latest, and surely most personal, work, Harold Bloom poses a question that may serve as the book's theme. He asks: Is there a relation between a writer's immortality and a reader's search for consolation in regard to the death of friends or family and intimations of the reader's own impending mortality? (2019, 505) This question comes at the end of a prolonged discussion of Proust, whose very appearance as the subject of the book's coda is hardly this work's least curious aspect. Bloom takes up the novelist's famous epiphanies, a corollary of the romantic sublime. For Bloom, these Wordsworthian "spots of time" are, however brief, intimations of immortality, and, as such, death-defying; they also contain "Proust's truth," which is "compounded of perception, involuntary memory, impressionism, a search for spiritual meaning, and a kind of atheistic mysticism" (497). These are more than just aspects of Proust's work; the near five hundred pages that precede this observation portray a critic who, too, is in search of lost time and achieves a similar effect. But Bloom's reverie on Proust finally gives way to the explicit statement of the book's theme cited above—which, in its remaining few pages, solely becomes, with reference to Samuel Johnson, "intimations of the reader's [Bloom's] own impending mortality." In his use of poetry as consolation in the face of death, late Bloom is all too human. This preoccupation, though, has simultaneously and strikingly led the criticism to literalize the poetic imagination. Bloom's critical memoir, perhaps inevitably, literalizes tropes such as time and death, which are so central to the earlier work. Whereas Bloom's well-known theory of poetic relations emerges from his consideration of a poet's sense of "lateness" and the necessity of "lying against time," Possessed by Memory is haunted by the physical actuality of these concepts. If the exigencies of a critic's life can so easily transform the function of his central tropes, such a phenomenon [End Page 345] raises the question: how do these tropes understood in the context of Bloom's theory of poetry formulate a theory of life?1 This question has alternate origins in the ending to Wallace Stevens' 1950 poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven": This endlessly elaborating poemDisplays the theory of poetry,As the life of poetry. A more severe, More harassing master would extemporizeSubtler, more urgent proof that the theoryOf poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (2015, xx) Stevens' romantic understanding of a poem as ars poetica and as "the life of poetry" is no longer especially romantic, for we as readers and writers have unconsciously internalized such assumptions, owing in no small part to Bloom's work over the last half century. Our poems are both statements about, and demonstrations of, our conceptions of poetry. "A more severe, more harassing master," Stevens goes further, allying the theory of poetry with the theory of life. The poem's final tercet ends with rich ambiguity: is poetry or lived experience the referent? Put differently, are the poem's final figurations tropes of writing or of living? Are "the intricate evasions of as" metaphor itself or artful human action? I find it nearly impossible to read Stevens' magnificent ending without thinking of the theory of creative misprision Bloom develops over the course of two decades, beginning in 1970 with his book on Yeats. For instance, what are intricate evasions if not a poet's swerves, his defense mechanism vis a vis the past? And what are such worlds (importantly, encompassing both heavens and hells) that a poet creates if not demiurgic? Recall Bloom's exchanges with de Man in the late seventies, which more than anything forces him to clarify his theory of poetic influence against those of his fellow intertextualists.2 The telling difference between Bloom's work...

The Pedagogy of the Aesthete: Oscar Wilde and Harold Bloom

The Pedagogy of the Aesthete:Oscar Wilde and Harold Bloom Daniel Rosenberg Nutters (bio) Cecily. I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should probably forget them all. Miss Prism. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry with us. —Oscar Wilde (1965, 57) In an interview given several months before his death, Edward Said comments, "any sign, in my opinion, of defeatism or dandyism or aestheticism à la Harold Bloom with his pathetic imitation of Oscar Wilde…is to be resisted" (Mallios 2005, 299). Such mockery is not an uncommon reaction to the invocation of Bloom's name in contemporary academic circles. I speak only of my own experience as one who proudly declares his Bloomian inheritance. In our time of political urgency, however, a moment of unending academic crises and the apparent actualization of doomsday prophesies from yesteryear, Bloom can be diminished to a caricature. To find it coming from Said is surprising given Bloom's importance for the worldly critic's thinking about beginnings and each critic's shared debt to Vico and agonistic vision of history. But when Bloom decries that he is tired of hearing about the political responsibilities of the literary critic and longs for a book on the literary responsibilities of the politician, the frustrated groans from recent generations of scholars might drown out the subtle continuity his "imitation of Oscar Wilde" has with Said's own understanding of criticism as performance. If we amended Bloom by substituting intellectual for politician, surely a reader would be liable to assume it is a quote from Said! Nevertheless, at least since the publication of The Western Canon and his full-scale attack on the school of resentment, Bloom is associated with the worst of aestheticism and it is easy to see him as a latter-day Saul Bellow searching for an African Tolstoy when he quips about literary studies denigration into lesbian Eskimo studies. How might we assess his legacy in this context? If Bloom thinks of himself as a comic critic fated to get all the serious reviews, how can those serious critics miss the element of (trivial) play within his prose? Like few others, Bloom's writing perfects the truth of masks and self-reinvention. Throughout [End Page 333] his career, he has been a Blakean rebel contesting the dominance of Eliotic New Criticism, a master-theoretician and systematizer in his tetralogy, a high priest of the Western canon, and, starting with the publication of The Anatomy of Influence, or maybe a bit further back with Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? or How to Read and Why, Bloom has transformed himself again. His late style is somber yet always humane and life-affirming, highly self-conscious, introspective, and wary of his previous guises. In The Anatomy of Influence, for example, Bloom opens with a section entitled "The Point of View for My Work as a Critic." The three chapters it contains offer a powerful defense of literature and criticism that reveals a pervasive continuity throughout his corpus. His focus on the sublime, otherness, and estrangement suggest that from the beginning of his career Boom's interest has simply been literature's ability to "transpor[t] us beyond ourselves, provoking uncanny recognition that one is never fully the author of one's work or one's self" (Bloom 2011, 20). This is a sentiment we find not only in the work of Bloom, but many of his peers in the so-called Yale School, not to mention others who write under the aura of French theory. I recall my M.A. advisor, a scholar of Derridean persuasion, reminding me to cultivate my "scene of writing." My dissertation advisor would confidently substitute "scene of instruction." Whatever the technical differences between Derrida's reading of Freud and Bloom's counter-reading, those critics we associate with theory demonstrate an unrelenting commitment to literature that enables transport. The devotion to the sublime as that which transcends the human is a deeply anti-humanistic sentiment. For Emily Dickinson, transport engenders pain and, for Bloom, it provokes the "uncanny recognition" that selfhood remains...

Zwischen Einflussangst und Einflusslust: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Tradition in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur ed. by Joanna Drynda, Alicja Krauze-Olejniczak, and Sławomir Piontek

Reviewed by: Zwischen Einflussangst und Einflusslust: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Tradition in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur ed. by Joanna Drynda, Alicja Krauze-Olejniczak, and Sławomir Piontek Andrew B. B. Hamilton Joanna Drynda, Alicja Krauze-Olejniczak, and Sławomir Piontek, eds., Zwischen Einflussangst und Einflusslust: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Tradition in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2017. 168 pp. The publication of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence in 1973 was a watershed moment in Anglo-American criticism, but its significance outside the anglophone world has largely been more muted and indirect, if no less extensive. A new edited volume, Zwischen Einflussangst und Einflusslust, sets out to address Bloom's terms directly, in the context of contemporary Austrian literature. The editors' foreword summarizes the objective of the book: Die Beiträge sind Versuche, an ausgewählten Beispielen aufzuzeigen, wie Schrift stellerinnen und Schrift steller unterschiedlicher intellektueller und ästhetischer Provenienz in ihrem Schaffen auf diverse Facetten der spezifisch österreichischen literarischen Tradition reagieren, inwiefern diese Tradition als Chance der Innovation begriffen wird bzw. werden kann, ohne den Gedanken an Originalitat und Autonomie überzustrapazieren. (7) This formulation of tradition as an occasion for innovation is familiar to anglophone readers from T. S. Eliot's influential essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which would in turn provide the skeleton for Bloom's model. The key here, though, is the insistence on the specificity of the Austrian case. For if Bloom's readings of Milton or Shelley must overcome the reader's skepticism about the posited Traditionsproblematik, the location of such Einflussangst in the centermost current of Austrian literature in the twentieth and twenty-first [End Page 87] centuries all but goes without saying. The question is not a theoretical one about poetry in general but a direct one about a specifically defined corpus: What does Bloom's model do to shed light on Austrian literary production of the present? The first of the volume's fourteen contributions comes from Günther A. Höfler. "Harald Blooms ödipale Einflussmystik und die Rolle der literarischen Vorläufer in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur" sets the tone for the volume and effectively elucidates the key ideas. The reader does not have to be familiar with Bloom's work to benefit from this collection. The first two sections of Höfler's essay are called "fragliche Zusammenhänge" and "Harold Blooms ödipale Geniereligion," and they offer a fine overview of what Bloom means by "Einflussangst/anxiety of influence," by "clinamen," by "poetic history," and by "genius," these being the key terms that drive his theory. But Höfler offers more than an overview or summary—he moves quickly to the discussion of specific Austrian cases. He points out a lovely affinity between Bloom and Thomas Bernhard, the latter having described to an interviewer shortly before the publication of The Anxiety of Influence that he sees himself as the enemy of his literary forebears and that the authors most important to him are those he most struggles with. For his part, Bloom included Bernhard's 1984 novel Holzfällen in his taste-making book The Western Canon. Höfler steps directly into one of the main difficulties posed by any study of literary influence when he titles the fourth section of his essay "Niemandes Söhne und Töchter: die literarische Generation Y," without offering at least a tentative definition of this generation. After all, people are born every year, and the genealogical metaphor implies a distinct division into generations, into parents and children. He does offer one defining characteristic of Generation Y, by way of Hurrelmann's and Albrecht's book Die heimlichen Revolutionäre: Wie die Generation Y die Welt verändert. He calls them the first digital natives—a solid and familiar premise, to be sure, except that the authors he turns to first of all as examples are born as early as 1978 and as late as 1990, too wide a range to claim a shared relationship to new technology, in my opinion. This is meant not as an attack, but only to point out how slippery these terms always are and how much Bloom is able to sidestep by putting a few centuries between himself...

Interpreting the Creative Spark: Intertextuality and Remediation in the Critical Work of Bloom and Hutcheon in Relation to the Fiction of E. T. A. Hoffmann

Interpreting the Creative Spark: Intertextuality and Remediation in the Critical Work of Bloom and Hutcheon in Relation to the Fiction of E. T. A. Hoffmann

Not the Last Word: Viscosupplementation, Opioid Overuse, and the Excesses of Empathy.

Not the Last Word: Viscosupplementation, Opioid Overuse, and the Excesses of Empathy.

Sounding Irish Radio at Midcentury

Sounding Irish Radio at Midcentury Ian Whittington The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968. Emily Bloom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 224. $80.00 (cloth). Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication. Damien Keane. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Pp. x + 195. $69.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). Reading through these two excellent new volumes situated at the intersection of radio studies and modern Irish literature, one feels presented with two very different instantiations of the radio listener. On the one hand, we have the dial-twirling shortwave enthusiast, stationed in (perhaps) Cork, and tuning in to transmissions Irish in affiliation but emanating from Dublin, Addis Ababa, New York City, Belfast, Geneva, London, and Berlin—transmissions that dazzle by their variety and that impart an awareness of their connectedness in dispersal. On the other hand, we have the idealized Third Programme listener of the midcentury BBC, at domestic ease in (perhaps, again) Belfast, attending closely and in the best tradition of appointment listening to familiar voices made new by the sense of their sudden, newfound proximity via the wireless. The former model is embodied by Damien Keane's Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication, the latter by Emily Bloom's The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968. If Keane's work rewrites rather dramatically the established geographical and formal dimensions of the Irish cultural field, Bloom's work pries that field open by slower but still sure degrees. Both make important contributions. What is remarkable, in comparing these two strikingly different texts, is how many parallels one finds at work in their logics. One senses that a new conceptual framework is cohering around literary radio studies: one that takes seriously the intermedial contexts of broadcasting and of literature, one that is attuned to the simultaneous and overlapping publics radio and literature created at local, regional, national, and [End Page 399] international scales, and one that understands radio to be neither an agent of hard determinism (subjecting its listeners to either the pummeling authoritarian tones of the dictator or the come-hither vocals of the crooner) nor of radical autonomy. Present, too, in both of these texts, is an archival consciousness that is at times reverent (as in Keane's acknowledgement of the work of historians, librarians, and archivists in remedying the longstanding informational vacuum surrounding Irish political culture at midcentury [5–6]) and at other times rousing (as in Bloom's rallying cry for greater access to extant radio archives that are all too often hidden away from public sight [21–23]). The differences that emerge between these works are not, however, superficial, even if at times they seem to represent different theoretical languages trying to address the same problems. Keane approaches the titular "problem of information"—which he describes as a simultaneous surfeit and deficit of information structured by global material inequalities—by treating all forms of textual production as part of the same contested field of relations. Thus the first chapter juxtaposes the broadcasts and League of Nations speeches of Taoiseach Éamon de Valera during the Ethiopian Crisis of 1935–36 with Walter Starkie's travelogue-cum-Italian-apologia The Waveless Plain (1938) as two versions of interwar Irish political self-positioning. In the former, de Valera—informed by a network of diplomats and civil servants—navigates multiple media in order to advocate for a protective withdrawal from an international order increasingly hostile to Ireland's interests. In the latter, Starkie uses aural media (his violin, the radio) as metonyms by which to conjure an organic fascist society, but neglects to address that society's structural mediation through government-mandated institutions and practices like the distribution of wireless sets. In each case, Keane's attention is on the often-obscured material and institutional contexts which subtend conventional debates about what counts as literary or political writing, and which in effect bind them beyond all disentanglement. Subsequent chapters deepen Keane's analysis of the mediated matrix of information that structured Irish cultural production around the war years. Chapter 2, "Dirty Work in New York," traces the...

The Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS): An Overview

Understanding productivity and business dynamics requires measuring production outputs and inputs. Through its surveys and use of administrative data, the Census Bureau collects information on production outputs and inputs including labor, capital, energy, and materials. With the introduction of the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS), the Census Bureau added information on another component of production: management. It has long been hypothesized that management is an important component of firm success, but until recently the study of management was confined to hypotheses, anecdotes, and case studies. Building upon the work of Bloom and Van Reenen (2007), the first-ever large scale survey of management practices in the United States, the MOPS, was conducted by the Census Bureau for 2010. A second, enhanced version of the MOPS is being conducted for 2015. The enhancement includes two new topics related to management: data and decision making (DDD) and uncertainty. As information technology has expanded plants are increasingly able to utilize data in their decision making. Structured management practices have been found to be complementary to DDD in earlier studies. Uncertainty has policy implications because uncertainty is found to be associated with reduced investment and employment. Uncertainty also plays a role in the targeting component of management.

Negative Influence

The central illumination of Harold Bloom's theory of influence was his insistence on the negative element of literary inheritance. This aspect of Bloom's work inspired fierce resistance, a resistance whose success may have masked, for many contemporary critics, the importance of negativity in poetic traditions. The article examines Emily Dickinson's “Essential Oils—are wrung” as an instance of a poem that may be clarified by an exploration of its negative response to her poetic predecessors, in this case the tradition of Petrarchanism. It explores a similar negativity in Alvin Feinman's “Relic,” in which a swerve from Petrarchanism threatens to undermine the position of the poet himself. The article concludes with a discussion of two poems by Brenda Hillman, “Remembering Form” and “Styrofoam Cup,” which suggest ways in which Bloomian misprision, the violent misreading of the past, induces an anxiety about the survival of the poetic impulse itself.

Education and the Good Society

Legislators ought to pay attention, above all else, to education.1 To the degree that scholars and educators are in any loose sense legislators, this injunction to treat seriously and above all else the question of education is just as imperative. The Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society has accordingly decided to focus the current issue of the journal to the subject of education, guided by this belief in the absolute necessity of education generally, and of university education particularly, to the flourishing or well-being of a good society. Nothing is as important. Last year important scholarship was done on the question of education, and two events particularly drew our attention. First, many scholars and academics marked the twentieth anniversary of Allan Bloom's controversial yet influential The Closing of the American Mind with conference panels and articles reassess ing the insights, merits, or flaws of that work. The same year, John L. Puckett, Ira Harkavy, and Lee Benson published their own thoughtful and engaging collaborative manifesto Dewey s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform, which sought to bring Dewey 's thought to bear on the current problems facing the academy and the good society. Greatly interested in pursuing scholarship on the question of education and the good society, we were inspired to take the educational thought of Allan Bloom and John Dewey (and, by extension, Dewey's contemporary supporters Puckett, Harkavy, and Benson) as our guides in putting together a symposium. Part of the reason for this is the obvious tension or disagreement on the role of education in the thought of these two men. Our symposium on education, then, consists chiefly of two parts. One focus, inspired by Puckett, Benson, and Harkavy's recent book, would consist of articles and reflections on John Dewey's thoughts and writing on education, especially as they relate to universities. The other focus would be on Allan Bloom's work. In the best cases, our contributors would address both foci; that is, there would be genuine dialogue. Bringing together a discussion of Dewey's democratic education together with Bloom's account lib ral education is truly an amazing feat. We believe that we have brought together an impressive group of diverse scholars to comment on two thinkers who wrote on education and are impressive, although quite distinct, in their own right: Allan Bloom and John Dewey. In this symposium, we first asked the contributors to reflect very generally on university education in the good society. To the extent that we offered any further guidance, we urged the contributors to consider the educational writings of Allan Bloom and John Dewey. However, we gave no explicit limitations as to what direction individual articles should take from this sug gestion. Indeed, the symposium before you consists of many articles that treat either Bloom or Dewey as well as those that treat them both. There are also a number of excellent articles

Anxiety, Apprenticeship, Accommodation: Paul Durcan and his Poetic Forefathers

Anxiety, Apprenticeship, Accommodation:Paul Durcan and his Poetic Forefathers Erik Martiny Throughout the considerable poetic outpout of Paul Durcan (b. 1944), one encounters work, often occasional poems, that concerns his literary forefathers. These poems, in turn, interact with the abundant presence of the father figure in his oeuvre. Looking at the forefathers portrayed in Durcan's poems about older male writers can help us to assess in what ways, and to what degree, Durcan adopts his literary precursors as substitute father figures. Durcan's conception of the father as "New Man"—a product of 1980s feminist progress—allows him to reject Freud's and Bloom's patriarchal visions of the forefather as "great inhibitor." It may well be, too, that his predilection for writing about male poetic precursors can be accounted for as a symptom, among other things, of his need to assert his vision of the New Father in opposition to the repressive, patriarchal values of his actual father, John James Durcan, the former president of the circuit court of Ireland. Arguing from a feminist perspective, Ruth Padel expressed her dismay that a poet so engaged with the depiction of women as Durcan shows seemingly little regard for female poets. Padel argues that poetry for Durcan is "perhaps inevitably a male journey, male game—except occasionally, when there's a special woman ('Woman Footballer of the Year'), or a specialist sport that does not involve balls. . . ."1 There is some truth in Padel's remarks; but she fails to explain in what way this tendency is "inevitable," and largely overlooks the homage Durcan paid to Sylvia Plath in his collection Daddy, Daddy (1990). Durcan's fascination with earlier male writers should not be read as an exclusion of female writers, but rather, as a means of taking stock of and coming to terms with his troubled relationship to his own father. Since Padel's dismissive remarks, Durcan has also eulogized another American foremother, the poet Elizabeth Bishop, in Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999); in "The Who's Who of American Poetry," he states that Bishop is, among much else, "the Patrick Kavanagh of [End Page 92] Rio de Janeiro."2 This is a supreme tribute, coming from such a Kavanagh-worshipper as Durcan. Yet it is true that few, if any, contemporary poets can compare to Durcan as a prolific adopter of poetic fathers. Writerly figures both living and dead are a staple feature of his work, finding their way into every one of his collections—almost as if he needed to feel the reassuring presence of older male writers.3 Up to a certain point, Harold Bloom's time-honored "anxiety of influence theory" is helpful in explaining Durcan's concern with forefathers. Bloom's much revered, and much reviled, theory of poetic creation remains a cornerstone in any study of a poet's relationship to his forebears. Despite the theory's appeal, its flaws are glaring: as Gilbert and Gubar have pointed out, Bloom fails to deal with the existence of literary foremothers and like the Freudian model it is based on, it ignores the issue of how women deal with their Oedipal precursors.4 Moreover, the paucity of Bloom's examples and their insufficient development make his six revisionary ratios seem vague, and sometimes arbitrary and interchangeable. Like Freud, Bloom tends to over-universalize his concepts, too rigidly reducing and structuring the study of what is inescapably multifarious. Edna Longley largely ignores Bloom, dismissing him as a nugatory example of "individualism and Romantic subjectivism run mad."5 And yet, Bloom remains, and his ideas on influence are still alluded to decades after their publication. Neil Corcoran—despite his misgivings about how Bloom's work "chimes too harmoniously with American masculinism" and that it delivers the "distressing news that poetry is the sublimation of aggression"—has recently made a convincing case by applying some of Bloom's theories to Paul Muldoon, Heaney, and Joyce.6 Durcan, from his early collections Endsville (1967) and O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975), to his most recent work has never ceased to interact—perhaps more in an interpersonal, rather than strictly intertextual way—with his forerunners...

The Anxiety of Daughterhood, or Using Bloom to Read Women Writers: The Cases of Louisa May Alcott and Virginia Woolf

Abstract‘The process of literary influence is a battle between strong equals, father and sons.’ So wrote Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence. But what of literary daughters? Can Bloom's work offer insights into the dynamics of literary influence for daughters as well as sons? Louisa May Alcott and Virginia Woolf were writer‐daughters of writer‐fathers who anxiously negotiated familial patriarchy and patriarchal literary history in their texts. In examinations of the power of fathers over the words of daughters, moreover, critics of Alcott and Woolf allude explicitly or otherwise to the theories of Bloom, the ‘father’ of influence studies. What happens when we apply Bloom's ideas to women's writing? Alcott's Little Women and the so‐called ‘Thrillers’ that she published anonymously offer very different images of daughterhood. When read alongside Bloom, these contradictions suggest Alcott's anxious relation to the influence of her father Bronson, the education reformer and leading member of the Transcendentalist movement. Like Louisa Alcott, Virginia Woolf negotiated her father's personal and public legacy in complex ways. In her writing from ‘A Sketch of the Past’, to To the Lighthouse, Sir Leslie Stephen's characteristic academic and mountaineering tropes may be seen to surface repeatedly. Bloom's model of literary influence as an anxiety towards a father figure that is ‘achieved’ within the writing offers new insights into the works of both women: in their writing Alcott and Woolf confronted their fathers’ legacies. That the personal and public battleground for these confrontations between father and daughter was writing suggests both the usefulness and limitations of Bloom's model for understanding the dynamics of literary influence upon women writers, and points to a new area of study for scholars of writing women.

A Historical Perspective on Closing Achievement Gaps

Although much has been written recently about gaps in the achievement of different groups of students, the problem has been with us for many years. This manuscript presents a historical perspective of the problem, viewing it as one of reducing variation in students' achievement. Specifically, it reviews the work of renowned educator Benjamin S. Bloom, who argued that to reduce variation in students' achievement and have all students learn well, we must increase variation in instructional approaches and learning time. Bloom also outlined a specific strategy to accomplish this instructional differentiation, labeling it "mastery learning."Bloom's work is described, along with common misinterpretations of his ideas and the results of research on the effectiveness of their implementation.

Understanding

There is no common agreement on the meaning of the word understand. However, there is agreement on what students should be able to do with material they understand. Bloom et al. discuss kinds of tasks a student should be able to do, provided that the student understands. In a similar way, Biggs and Collis provide a taxonomy intended to evaluate the quality of learning. Both of these taxonomies are intended to fit all subjects. The work here concerns understanding and so is like that of Bloom et al. Some of Bloom's work is reorganized and added to in order to provide different types of questions to test understanding of mathematics.

Joseph Jefferson: Dean of the American Theatre

Arthur W. Bloom has written the definitive biography of the nineteenth-century comic actor Joseph Jefferson (1829–1905), best known for his portrayal of Rip Van Winkle, a role he acted for about forty years. Jefferson's own autobiography (1889) offers a chatty and entertaining commentary on his life and nineteenth-century theater, and, until now, the best biographies were affectionate reminiscences by Jefferson's theatrical cohorts, Francis Wilson (1906) and William Winter (1894). Bloom's work provides voluminous detail against which to measure Jefferson's lengthy career. In three hundred pages Bloom chronologically examines Jefferson's youth and theatrical apprenticeship, his early career with the actress and manager Laura Keene, his years abroad during the Civil War, and his emergence and decades of touring stardom in the role of Rip. A hundred-page appendix details Jefferson's tours from the season of 1866–1867 until his last in spring 1904. Bloom lists every town, theater, and performance he could document over that thirty-eight years. An additional hundred pages of endnotes add substantial material to this exhaustive study; they also identify the author's admirably wide-ranging sources.