![]() ![]() There is no unmediated vision, whether in poetry or in any other mode, but only mediated revision, for which an other name is anxiety, in the Freudian sense of “ anxious expec tations.” Freud, in his final phase, showed that anxiety was pre-emptive, that it established itself prior to any stimulus, and so in some sense created the catastrophe of such a negative stimulus. But this referential aspect is both masked and me diated, and the agent of concealment and of relationship always is another poem. There is, despite much contemporary criticism, a referential aspect to a poem, which keeps it from com ing into being only as a text, or rather keeps a text from being merely a text. The origins and aims of poetry together constitute its powers, and the powers of poetry, however they relate to or affect the world, rise out of a loving conflict with previous poetry, rather than out of conflict with the world. But again, why should someone crossing out of literary criticism address the problematics of revisionism? W h at else has Western poetry been, since the Greeks, must be the answer, at least in part. As my first chapter at tempts to adumbrate, that is the center of this book: the American religion of competitiveness, which is at once our glory and (doubt less) our inevitable sorrow. The first theologians of agon were the Gnostics of Alexandria, and the final pragmatists of agon have been and will be the Americans of Emerson's tradition. Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Huizinga are the cultural theorists of the agonistic spirit, from the Greeks and the Hebrews onwards, but Freud is the prophet of agon and of its ambivalences. The spirit portrays itself as agonistic, as contesting for supremacy, with other spirits, with anteriority, and finally with every earlier version of itself. Revisionism, as Nietzsche said of every spirit, unfolds itself only in fighting. But there is a telling (and a killing) dif ference. Pragmatically has become only a trope for Romanticism, just as Romanticism earlier became a trope for the European Enlighten ment, the Enlightenment for the Renaissance, and the Renais sance for the Ancients. W hatever revisionism is, as a process or even as a dialectic, why should someone coming out of (or working at the outer limits of) literary criticism attempt to theorize about its nature? Revisionism But what is revisionism? To that question, this book attempts some partial answer, as these chapters direct themselves towards the theory of revisionism its au thor hopes to live to write. It is revisionism, and not repression or supposed sublimation, that is the discontent in civilization Freud most truly explored. Revisionism is this book’s subject, and revisionism, in personal life, in society and its institutions, in religion, and in the arts and sciences and all the academic disciplines, is a fierce process, however that process conceals itself in the codes of civilization. W hat, beyond the aggressive personalism of the author, can hold together so eclectic a range? I deny the eclecticism, though 1 would not attempt to refute a charge that this book at tempts to transcend what is generally considered to be literary theory and its working through in practical criticism. P N 10 31.B 52 8 809.1 8 1-10 6 2 ISBN 0 -19 -5 0 2 9 4 5-3 A A C R 2Ī book might seem an anomaly that offers itself as a unity in de sign and theme, but includes chapters on the ancient religion of Gnosticism, on Freud, on Emerson and W hitman and Hart Crane, on American Jewish cultural prospects, and on the author's own theories of fantasy, of the Sublime and of poetry and its interpre tation. American poetry-History and criticism- Addresses, essays, lectures. ![]() Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bloom, Harold. New York Oxford O XFO RD U N IV ER SITY PRESS 19 8 2
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |