Kabbalah and Criticism (Kabbalah & Criticism Paper) [Paperback]

William Golding (Author), Harold Bloom (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0826402429 | ISBN-13: 978-0826402424 | Publication Date: January 1981 | Edition: First Edition

"I am intrigued by the unexpected parallels and analogies that he has found...often difficult...but never dull..". -- Jaroslav Pelikan

"Bloom's... unraveling of the Kabbalistic theory is very well informed". -- The New York Review of Books

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Harold Bloom (b. 1930) is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. He is the author of more than twenty books, including The Anxiety of Influence; Deconstruction and Criticism; The Book of J; The Western Canon; Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; and Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group; First Edition edition (January 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826402429
• ISBN-13: 978-0826402424
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,279,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reconstitution, July 12, 2000

By 

Douglas A. Storm (Glen Carbon, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kabbalah and Criticism (Kabbalah & Criticism Paper) (Paperback)

This is by no means a review. I find Bloom stimulating in all his various books even if frequently obscure and discursive. He incites me to want to know more. This book is no different. Don't know much about Kabbalah? Well, don't look here for answers (Bloom himself encourages you to seek out Gershom Sholem's work in the field). Instead you'll find insights into reading and interpretation, for this is what Bloom's entire oeuvre is really about--how we discover meaning in all aspects of human endeavor.

This book is a wonderful tease on one hand--name-dropping in an esoteric field is always interesting and makes me want to search out those "formidable" authors--and an attempt to fill in some of the gaps in Bloom's readers' knowledge--he's been talking Kabbalah from the beginning and in this dedicated volume you begin to really understand its hold on him.

Short and sweet and worth the effort.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Messiah Never Comes, January 7, 2007

By 

benjamin (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kabbalah and Criticism (Continuum Impacts) (Paperback)

This short little book contains three essays that move from the exoterically esoteric to the downright incomprehensible. Like Kabbalah itself is often assumed to be, Bloom's thinking is like a Gnostic nugget - albeit without the imaginative cosmology that Gnosticism historically had - where the first essay is like the outside of the pomegranate, the second essay like the layer around the pomegranate and the third essay the actual fruit. Kabbalah and Criticism is set within a Scholem-esque historiography but with one thing missing: the Messiah which, in Bloom's work, never appears - indeed, one can wonder whether or not the Messiah is ever coming at all! The actual fruit turns out to be empty and emptying; rather than taking us anywhere, Kabbalah and Criticism simply leaves the reader hanging.

The first essay is an explanation of the major themes in Jewish mysticism/Kabbalah, focusing primarily on its Zoharic (13th century) and Lurianic (15th & 16th century) manifestations. Kabbalah is usually considered fairly esoteric; ironically, this essay is the most exoteric in the entire book. It is clear that Bloom has digested the writings of Gershom Scholem - the brilliant mind who first brought Jewish mysticism into academic credibility in the 20th century - and it is from within this Scholem-esque framework that Bloom operates.

In the second essay, however, Kabbalah is clearly shown to not actually be a map of the world, but a type of two-dimensional signifier in which the various interactions between the the Ten Sefirot exist not as signifiers pointing to the reality of God, but as signifiers pointing to the fact that texts themselves interact with each other and that the interaction is not found first and foremost in the texts or the Sefirot, but in the space between them. Thus Kabbalah, rather than speaking of God, becomes a springboard for a literary theory. Why it is that Kabbalah ought to be this springboard is never explained; given the commodification of all things Kabbalistic today, it seems that Bloom is no different, for Kabbalah is entirely unnecessary for his theory - it's just a useful heuristic, and nothing more.

The heuristic, furthermore, never actually serves to take the reader to any point of understanding. Thus, for Bloom, Kabbalah is a series of symbols that interact within one another ad infinitum but because they are never anything more than that, nothing ever arrives in Kabbalah any more than in any text. In short, Bloom's theory is entirely devoid of a Messiah: just as the symbols symbolize unendingly in Bloom's Kabbalistic maze (something that Scholem would have found quite hard to accept), so too does the text itself continually exist in need of re-reading - or, as Bloom prefers, *mis-reading*. Literature is a series of misreadings, a confusion of interpretation with text by insisting that all interpretation *is* the text that is being interpreted. By the time Bloom gets to this essay, he is so far from the Jewish mysticism that he began with that it becomes quite clear that Kabbalah is really quite superfluous to his whole theory. He *mis-reads* Kabbalah and, in doing so, is only capable of arguing that interpretation - mis-reading - justifies itself.

If one is interested in Harold Bloom, the back of this book claims that "Kabbalah and Criticism may justly be regarded as the cardinal work in Harold Bloom's enterprise." I honestly can't understand why anyone would bother, though, for its Kabbalism is vacuous and its criticism vapid. Bloom is a brilliant guy, but because his Kabbalism lacks the possibility of a Messiah - a reading in which the text and the reader meet in a moment of deep meaning - Kabbalah and Criticism simply wanders in a desert of thin symbols lifted out of their historical context and it therefore begins to look not just like the Messiah will never come, but that there is no historical world for him to even come to.