[.ca] Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (ISBN 0446691291)

read the books yourselve's people:
You don't need some pretentious ass telling you what's great. I agree with the reviews sick of the shakespeare reference. Shakespeare was good, but many of the writers on here are alot better. In responsoe to one of the reviewers "Science for Bloom (and that other Bloom, too) is anthropology - psychology, the social stuff that may strive to apply scientific methods but is far from natural science; and he (they) show, in their proclivity for cabalism and antipathy for imperial, dull and wrong "science", that they have, like the majority of Americans, never taken a single course in biology, evolution, geology, physics, cosmology; never read, say, Wilson, Darwin, Dennett, Lyle, Hawking, Weinberg, Sagan. Their "gnosticism" is a cheesy wriggling out of of both religion and science. If he/they want to make any reference to dogmas of science, he/they need to understand it a little. Science is not what they think it is." I agree that social sciences are almost pseudo sciences. All the good stuff in psych is just common sense. And yes, I have taken several courses in math, Physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry.(I even made it to state for biology in hs). I have also taken courses in philosophy and theology. I feel, unlike bloom, that science ad religion are very important. Science is not perfect though. Many of the great scientists you listed had atheistic agendas. Men such as Hawking are uncomfortable with the creational notions of the big bang, so they are always devising some ridiculous way to get around it. I think Hawking is probably overrated anyway because of his wheelchair condition.

Third times a charm...:
At times this book is amusing, entertaining, sometimes even enlightening but most of all exasperating. Harold Bloom has spent half a century digging deep into the best that our literary culture has to offer, but all he has given us, once again, is another 800 pages of unedited notes. Each Genius is regrettably reduced to a few pages of off-hand comments and we have seen many of these comments too many times before in his books on the Western Canon and Shakespeare. There is some humor and insight but for every insight we get thirty pages of unexplained marginalia like the following: "Negation of seeming realities in an ostensibly Christian society is the essence of Kierkegaard's genius, but this was an anxiety for him, since Kierkegaard had to be post-Hegelian, even as we have to be post-Freudian." This might make a great thesis statement for a long article (or even a book) but Bloom tosses it off like it is a self-evident truth that needs no further elaboration. I suspect it meant something interesting to Bloom, but it is lost on those mortals among us who cannot read his mind (and he complains about the obfuscation of the French!) I guess if you are as well-established and respected as Harold Bloom then you no longer need to write books, you can merely publish them.

The Critic as Genius:
Genius by Harold Bloom. A mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds,Fourth Estate, London,2002 25 pounds. With this book Harold Bloom reaffirms the place he has already staked out for himself, as the most bold and ambitious literary critic of our time. He does this by surveying world literature and selecting from it the one - hundred supreme literary geniuses, and in five or six pages for each discussing what defines the unique genius if each one.Each chapter has a short frontispiece in which he says something more general about the life and work of the individual creator, and a larger section in which he reads and interprets a selected piece of writing of the particular genius. His analysis and his own writing sparkle with aphoristic brilliance,with deep and broad knowledge, and with a rare capacity to make remarkable new connections between literary figures and worlds. Above all, the book is pervaded by his love of reading, his love of great imaginative literature.And the whole work is testament to and evidence of his total enthusiasm about and dedication to this world Frequently in the work he mentions with a degree of modesty which would make Faustus proud, his knowing by heart vast sections of a particular literary masterpiece. This recalling time and again his own memorizing of particular works, is only one of the many obsessions which play such a large part in the work.Bloom does not remind repeating himself, tells us over and over again that he is seventy - one, that to his regret he has lived to see the university world taken over by the politically correct. He rails against those curricula which select writers on basis of ethnic belonging, gender, race.He does not stop insisting that the great body of the media world, the popular culture, the university world is involved in nonsense and trivia.He presents himself as a kind of romantic hero, defending not only the literary greats he present, but the very idea of literary greatness, of genius of the imagination itself. And thus without declaring it openly, he presents himself as the one hundred and first genius of the work, the one who has come to rescue all the others.He is the the reader as genius who has come to save all the other geniuses from all the postmodern Foucalt - Derrida deriders whose leveling spirit defines the mediocrity of the age. What is remarkable is how well Bloom does the work he sets out to do. His writing, line by line, writer by writer is truly alive, thought - provoking and inspiring. Bloom organizes his geniuses into groups of ten groups of ten,each representing a Kabbalistic sphere or realm of emnation.They are then subdivided into groups of five each of which is called a ' lustre'. Each lustre a term he takes from Emerson and Plutarch which means shining by reflected light, is meant to hint at the influence the geniuses grouped together have upon each other. This scheme which in one sense seems arbitrary, nonetheless often works to help him make interconnections which are often surprising and rich.For instance his first section in which he takes five of the greatest literary geniuses,Shakespeare,Cervantes,Montaigne,Milton Tolstoy,is called Keter or Crown.It contains those geniuses each of which ' dominates his genre forever'Bloom says Shakespeare was influenced by Montaigne and Cervantes,that Milton is ' uneasily ' influenced by Shakespeare,and that Tolstoy who ' hated Shakespeare ' nonethless knew how to in the novel of his old age, Hadji Murad use his influence in his varied characterizations. Here it is necessary to point out the special role Shakespeare plays in Bloom's literary world.Shakespeare is not as in Borges words, " the one who created the most " he is what for Bloom is most important in literary art,the supreme creator of character. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth,Iago,Falstaff, Rosalind, are fictional characters more memorable more living more immortal, in Bloom's judgment, than most human beings. The use of the Sefirot while in one sense artificial nonetheless enhances the connections between the various writers and enriches the work.Taken as a whole it gives the suggestion of these literary creators as embodying the whole of G-d 's creation, the ineffable radiance of all Being. And this when there is of course the reservation that such creation is by no means complete, as Bloom includes in his list no living author, and of course, no great authors of the future. As for the religious implication of the scheme it is clear that in making all the world, the world of literature Bloom is speaking for himself as a person who has given all his life to literature, whose religion is the reading of literature, an odd religion of one, and of his own peculiar greatness. An alternative reading would see all these literary creators not necessarily in heroic rebellion against G-d, but as creators working to complete God's creation. This alternative view that of normative Judaism, would see genius as a ' gift of God . The world each creator makes is one element which is God's, while the characters too, including the authors are also ' creations ' of God, who enrich and fill up God;s world. Each great creator is an especially chosen servant of God. Each creator is connected with but cannot contain or exhaust the Source of creative power whose manifestations will continue to surprise us..In this sense the love of literature, the love of reading is simply one particular expression of God's love for us, and for our capacity to love G-d in return. Literature which enhances life, which gives life meaning and beauty are God's gift to us, which we contribute to through our own creations. Bloom's work enhances our love for literature and life. Those who read this book will have a deeper appreciation for the place of reading great literature in life, and for the power and greatness of the single individual human being ( in this case, Harold Bloom) the creator of Genius. .

The Bloom 100:
This thick book is Harold Bloom's meditation on literary genius, by which he means not exactly an extraordinary intelligence but a communication with the "God within," an internal source of world-expanding creative inspiration, that only few people manage to achieve. He selects one hundred authors -- the list, he stresses, is by no means hermetic -- in the literary canon who in his estimation have done this, subdividing them into ten groups of ten, each group represented by a concept from the Kabbalah called a Sefirah. For example, under Hesed, or "God's covenant love for men and women," he locates Donne, Pope, Swift, Austen, and others who he feels manifest various aspects (especially irony, one of his favorite topics) of such love. Which authors have genius? Shakespeare, obviously, and all the classical poets whose works have survived for a number of centuries, and Bloom's personal hero of literary criticism, Samuel Johnson, and even T.S. Eliot, towards whom Bloom displays a dichotomous attitude of admiration mixed with hostility. What evidence of genius is offered that elevates these authors above the merely talented? For Renaissance historian and prose stylist extraordinaire Walter Pater, it is his "secularization of the religious epiphany"; for Balzac, it is his mercurial comic criminal Vautrin; for Robert Browning, it is his perfected development of the dramatic monologue. I regard Bloom's opinions very highly and respect his efforts to rescue the best literature of the ages from forced obsolescence by the authorities of ephemeral ideologies in what he considers to be the intellectually decadent academic institutions, but I'm not blind to his idiosyncrasies as a critic (call them "Bloomisms") for which he surely would not apologize and which anybody approaching his criticism for the first time has to keep in mind. The most notable is his insistence on putting just about everything literary in relation to Shakespeare's major characters: Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, and Lear. Next is his tendency to make thunderous declarations and magisterial assertions of canonical rank ("Proust is the last of the great novelists") which will hardly persuade an unimpressionable reader who isn't looking for a lecture. Past this, you will find that Bloom is so enthusiastic about the world's greatest literature and writes so well about his passion that it is immediately infectious. His desire is to motivate his readers to become better readers by demanding the highest standards, and so he isn't reticent about using superlatives to make his points. His dedication to literary quality highlights the book's greatest usefulness, which is to introduce or uncover important authors that are overlooked by or unknown to a large portion of readers; Montaigne, Saint Augustine, Carpentier, and Hart Crane are not widely read today, but Bloom argues cogently that they should be because their work is substantial and still relevant. Also, those authors whose works are of considerable cognitive difficulty are made more accessible to the common reader by Bloom's helpful clarifications of their themes. "Genius" is indeed bloated, but its bloat is of mostly informative commentary and more than a few entertaining quips. Bloom can be provocative: "Emma Bovary is Gustave Flaubert, and almost all the rest of us as well." Or humorous: "Dante, like the rest of us, suffered a great deal, but many of us would be hesitant before we peopled Hell with our personal enemies," he says about the "Inferno." Or incisive: "Freud, who wanted to be a third with Copernicus and Darwin, became a third with Montaigne and Goethe," he says about Freud's success as a mythmaking essayist despite, or perhaps as a result of, his (failed) aspirations to be a scientific revolutionary. He can also be pedantic and often acrimonious when mentioning his academic opponents; but most importantly he, more than any other current critic, is gracious enough to put up the signposts on the long, winding highway of Western literature, and for that reason I'm willing to take his side. After all, what have the ideological cheerleaders ever done for me?

Another attempt by Bloom to push his agenda on literature:
They should have titled this "The Western Canon part two." Bloom gets to glorify his favorite poster boys Shakespeare and Freud again, as well as sermonize about others such as Cervantes, Mann and Faulkner (who have no business being called genuises). In addition, the title is also misleading in the sense that Bloom actually means, "Literary Creative Minds." Nowhere does he talk about Michaelangelo, DaVinci, Monet, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Schubert, Rachmaninoff etc etc etc. He also ignores two very creative literary figures; Dr. Suess and Vladimir Nabokov, two authors whose genius cannot be contested. It might be taken as arrogance that Bloom has only focused on literary genius, or what he takes to be genius. The implication is that writers, poets and philosophers have sole claim to the title "Genius." Actually, this is just the limitations of Bloom's training as an English Professor, as well as a product of his horrifically inventive and capable mind. Wouldn't one be biased towards literatures if they had spent their whole lives teaching and researching just that? This book is also produced on the assumption that the author knows exactly what makes a genius a genius. Although when one reads the book, the impression is that Bloom is far more fascinated with the works of the subject rather than the figures themselves, but this is what he does. So if you're searching for very incisive criticism on the lives of some very prominent people in the written history, delve in. If you're a student of music, art or even mathematics, this book is not about you. Bloom caters to the exclusive group of literateurs. This is precisely what Bloom wants though, exclusivity. He wants to banish what he thinks is mediocrity to the rafters where they can hoot and hollar to the ceiling, and leave us high-minded ones alone to our thoughts. A intriguing thought, yes, but mediocrity exists to give light to genius (didn't "Amadeus" teach us anything?). Genius only exists because the debate of genius continues, and while this book might be seen as such, it is really only a few steps away from it's big brother "Western Canon," a book in which Bloom says that a Canon cannot be defined, and yet in the appendices, attempts just such a Canon. Also with Bloom is the air that he's constantly looking over the tops of his glasses at us, trying to get us to read what he's read, agree with him, and just sit there in agreement. No thank you.