Wednesday, August 24th, 2011
KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 6

IN THE SIXTH issue of KindleReads for DragonWeb I have collected articles that tackle various topics from Slavoj Žižek's take on the recent Norwegian massacre to the state of liberal arts and the challenges of digital humanities to an interview with Harold Bloom.

Table of Contents

- A vile logic to Anders Breivik's choice of target

- Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground

- Coding in the Humanities

- Harold Bloom on Literary Criticism

A vile logic to Anders Breivik's choice of target | Slavoj Žižek

In Anders Behring Breivik's ideological self-justification as well as in reactions to his murderous act there are things that should make us think. The manifesto of this Christian "Marxist hunter" who killed more than 70 people in Norway is precisely not a case of a deranged man's rambling; it is simply a consequent exposition of "Europe's crisis" which serves as the (more or less) implicit foundation of the rising anti-immigrant populism – its very inconsistencies are symptomatic of the inner contradictions of this view.

The first thing that sticks out is how Breivik constructs his enemy: the combination of three elements (Marxism, multiculturalism and Islamism), each of which belongs to a different political space: the Marxist radical left, multiculturalist liberalism, Islamic religious fundamentalism. The old fascist habit of attributing to the enemy mutually exclusive features ("Bolshevik-plutocratic Jewish plot" – Bolshevik radical left, plutocratic capitalism, ethnic-religious identity) returns here in a new guise.

Even more indicative is the way Breivik's self-designation shuffles the cards of radical rightist ideology. Breivik advocates Christianity, but remains a secular agnostic: Christianity is for him merely a cultural construct to oppose Islam. He is anti-feminist and thinks women should be discouraged from pursuing higher education; but he favours a "secular" society, supports abortion and declares himself pro-gay.

His predecessor in this respect was Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch rightist populist politician who was killed in early May 2002, two weeks before elections in which he was expected to gain one fifth of the votes. Fortuyn was a paradoxical figure: a rightist populist whose personal features and even opinions (most of them) were almost perfectly "politically correct". He was gay, had good personal relations with many immigrants, displayed an innate sense of irony – in short, he was a good tolerant liberal with regard to everything except his basic stance towards Muslim immigrants.

What Fortuyn embodied was thus the intersection between rightist populism and liberal political correctness. Indeed, he was the living proof that the opposition between rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one, that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin: ie we can have a racism which rejects the other with the argument that it is racist.

Furthermore, Breivik combines Nazi features (also in details – for example, his sympathy for Saga, the Swedish pro-Nazi folk singer) with a hatred of Hitler: one of his heroes is Max Manus, the leader of the Norway anti-Nazi resistance. Breivik is not so much racist as anti-Muslim: all his hatred is focused on the Muslim threat.

And, last but not least, Breivik is antisemitic but pro-Israel, as the state of Israel is the first line of defence against the Muslim expansion – he even wants to see the Jerusalem temple rebuilt. His view is that Jews are OK as long as there aren't too many of them – or, as he wrote in his manifesto: "There is no Jewish problem in western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only have 1 million in western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these 1 million live in France and the UK. The US, on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews (600% more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem." He realises the ultimate paradox of a Zionist Nazi – how is this possible?

A key is provided by the reactions of the European right to Breivik's attack: its mantra was that in condemning his murderous act, we should not forget that he addressed "legitimate concerns about genuine problems" – mainstream politics is failing to address the corrosion of Europe by Islamicisation and multiculturalism, or, to quote the Jerusalem Post, we should use the Oslo tragedy "as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere". The newspaper has since apologised for this editorial. (Incidentally, we are yet to hear a similar interpretation of the Palestinian acts of terror, something like "these acts of terror should serve as an opportunity to re-evaluate Israeli politics".)

A reference to Israel is, of course, implicit in this evaluation: a "multicultural" Israel has no chance to survive; apartheid is the only realistic option. The price for this properly perverse Zionist-rightist pact is that, in order to justify the claim to Palestine, one has to acknowledge retroactively the line of argumentation which was previously, in earlier European history, used against the Jews: the implicit deal is "we are ready to acknowledge your intolerance towards other cultures in your midst if you acknowledge our right not to tolerate Palestinians in our midst".

The tragic irony of this implicit deal is that, in the European history of last centuries, Jews themselves were the first "multiculturalists": their problem was how to survive with their culture intact in places where another culture was predominant.

But what if we are entering an era where this new reasoning will impose itself? What if Europe should accept the paradox that its democratic openness is based on exclusion – that there is "no freedom for the enemies of freedom", as Robespierre put it long ago? In principle, this is, of course, true, but it is here that one has to be very specific. In a way, there was a vile logic to Breivik's choice of target: he didn't attack foreigners but those within his own community who were too tolerant towards intruding foreigners. The problem is not foreigners, it is our own (European) identity.

Although the ongoing crisis of the European Union appears as a crisis of economy and finances, it is in its fundamental dimension an ideologico-political crisis: the failure of referendums about the EU constitution a couple of years ago gave a clear signal that voters perceived the EU as a "technocratic" economic union, lacking any vision which could mobilise people – until the recent protests, the only ideology able to mobilise people was the anti-immigrant defence of Europe.

Recent outbursts of homophobia in eastern European post-communist states should also give us pause for thought. In early 2011, there was a gay parade in Istanbul where thousands walked in peace, with no violence or other disturbances; in gay parades which took place at the same time in Serbia and Croatia (Belgrade, Split), police were not able to protect participants who were ferociously attacked by thousands of violent Christian fundamentalists. These fundamentalists, not Turkey's, are the true threat to the European legacy, so when the EU basically blocked Turkey's entry, we should ask the obvious question: what about applying the same rules to eastern Europe?

Antisemitism belongs to this series, alongside other forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. The state of Israel is here making a catastrophic mistake: it decided to downplay, if not completely ignore, the "old" (traditional European) antisemitism, focusing instead on the "new" and allegedly "progressive" antisemitism masked as the critique of the Zionist politics of the state of Israel. Along these lines, Bernard Henri-Lévy (in his Left in Dark Times) recently claimed that the antisemitism of the 21st century would be "progressive" or not exist at all. This thesis compels us to turn around the old Marxist interpretation of antisemitism as a mystified anti-capitalism (instead of blaming the capitalist system, the rage is focused on a specific ethnic group accused of corrupting the system): for Henri-Lévy and his partisans, today's anti-capitalism is a disguised form of antisemitism.

This unspoken but no less efficient dismissal of those who would attack the "old" antisemitism is taking place at the very moment when the "old" antisemitism is returning all around Europe, especially in post-communist eastern European countries, from Hungary to Latvia. Something that should worry us even more is the rise of a weird accommodation between Christian fundamentalists and Zionists in the US.

There is only one solution to this enigma: it is not that the US fundamentalists have changed, it is that Zionism itself has paradoxically come to adopt some antisemitic logic in its hatred of Jews who do not fully identify with the politics of the state of Israel. Their target, the figure of the Jew who doubts the Zionist project, is constructed in the same way as the European antisemites constructed the figures of the Jew – he is dangerous because he lives among us, but is not really one of us. Israel is playing a dangerous game here: Fox News, the main US voice of the radical right and a staunch supporter of Israeli expansionism, recently had to demote Glenn Beck, its most popular host, whose comments were getting openly antisemitic.

The standard Zionist argument against the critics of the policies of the state of Israel is that, of course, like every other state, Israel can and should be judged and eventually criticised, but that the critics of Israel misuse the justified critique of Israeli policy for antisemitic purposes. When the Christian fundamentalist supporters of the Israeli politics reject leftist critiques of Israeli policies, their implicit line of argument is illustrated by a wonderful cartoon published in July 2008 in the Viennese daily Die Presse: it shows two stocky, Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend: "Here you can see again how a totally justified antisemitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!" These are today's allies of the state of Israel.

Source URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/08/anders-behring-breivik-pim-fortuyn
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Ian Bogost - Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground

This is the first part of a two-part essay about the humanities. Part 1 discusses some current ideas about the role of the humanities in the university and the world. Part 2 will address the trend of the "digital humanities" in light of these observations. -ib

Recently, Stanford comparative literature professor David Palumbo-Liu made a case for why the humanities are indispensible. It's one in a long history of such justifications, a task that seems as necessary as ever. Yet, as with so many such justifications, Palumbo-Liu's speaks declaratively. Consider his closing charge—one I saw excerpted frequently and with enthusiasm in the days after he wrote it:

Lowering the bar for the humanities, or even dismissing the humanities as not having anything specific to teach us, is not only abrogating our responsibilities as teachers, but also ignoring the very patent evidence that the humanities are our solace and aid in life, and we need them now more than ever.

That evidence, it turns out, is the continued presence of individuals in humanities courses and degrees, where complex topics get discussed in traditional literary form. The humanities is indispensable, it would seem, because some people still find insight in novels. I'm being flip, but not too much.

In his final book, The Conflict of the Faculties, Immanuel Kant discusses the relationship between the university and the state. Kant makes a distinction between "lower faculties," those oriented toward theoretical reason and "higher faculties," those oriented toward practical reason. The higher faculties serve state and mercantile interests, and they are therefore bound to external ends. By contrast, the lower faculties are autonomous activities, separate from the interests of law or business. Kant's position on this matter influenced Wilhelm von Humboldt's design for the University of Berlin, an institution which in turn influenced the structure of the modern university, with its separation of professional schools and faculties of arts and sciences.

Here, between the higher and the lower faculties, lies a the trap the humanities often falls into when self-justifying.

On the one hand, humanists want to retain a place in the lower faculties, arguing that their work cannot be probed for predictable value. But then on the other hand, humanists constantly claim to have measurable value propositions. And worse yet, those value propositions are always so vague as to be essentially meaningless: "critical thinking," "lifelong learning," "communication," "cultural perspectives," and so forth. Palumbo-Liu's "solace and aid" is a reasonable candidate for this list as well.

This is a troubling move. For one part, it simultaneously embraces the high faculties' logic of predictable usefulness while also offering relatively weak examples of utility. Worse still, when humanists comport themselves according to the tentatively useful values they espouse, the results tend mostly to service intellectualism anyway ("critical thinking," for example, mostly takes the form of fashionable censure). "Communication" about "culture" tends toward cryptic self-reference and directs itself at insiders alone. Humanism has professionalized, and the interests it serves most often are its own.

For another part, there's nothing necessarily humanistic about skills like critical thinking or lifelong learning or communication or even culture or solace. These are qualities to which almost any discipline could reasonably lay claim. Who is to say that linear algebra is any less of a candidate for critical thinking than is Latin? Or that computer science can't develop an interest in lifelong learning as much as art history can? Or that civil engineering isn't cultural? Thus, the humanities' stock self-justifications both embrace the high faculty's frame of utility, and in so doing they offer responses that don't really answer the question.

One could simply refuse the challenge entirely. Famously, Stanley Fish did exactly that: "To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. ... An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good."

A lot of people didn't like Fish's answer (a lot of people just don't like Fish), but at least it was definitive. It held the line. Still, it's not the sort of argument that works anymore (if it ever did), unless you're someone like Stanley Fish.

But even if you are, would you want to make such an argument? That the only use your field serves is to serve itself, to reflect on itself, to return its spoils home, like hoarders or profiteers? Does being of use really threaten humanism so that it must insist on being "above" accounting? Is being on the books really the problem? Or is the problem rather that humanists have systematically removed themselves from the domain of human practice itself, mistaking participation for adulteration?

It's a situation created by a fundamental misunderstanding of what the "lower faculties" are meant to do. The humanities are not meant to run "off the books" as an elbow-patched playground. Instead, they are meant to represent and nurture a populace in the face of the governmental and organizational interests served by the higher faculties. The humanities are meant to be populist rather than statist. They shouldn't stand "against usefulness," but rather "toward the world."

And here, despite their name, the humanities have generally failed. As I've argued before, humanists bear active disdain for actual humans, whom they often perceive to be ignorant suckers, willing interpellees too far outside the "honorable" inner sanctum of Fishy humanism to be capable of the reflection the humanities claims to offer them. Humanist intellectuals like to think of themselves as secular saviors working tirelessly in the shadows. But too often, they're just vampires who can't remember the warmth of daylight.

Admittedly, there are not always obvious worldly correspondences for humanist interests like there are for engineers and lawyers. But the public has its own concerns, and often those would seem to intersect with matters of humanistic interest: "thinking and reflection on the human condition," to use Palumbo-Liu's words. But how can one think and reflect on the human condition while assuming either that it must be done apart from those conditions, since to do otherwise would be to be "useful" or "accounted for?" Or, alternately, how can the material for that reflection materialize in isolation from the world in which it exists? The value of the humanities is assumed to be intuitive, unchanging, and hermetic.

The result is the puzzle with which I started: we have something to offer, but only to ourselves or to those who volunteer to join us. To offer something different would either transform the lower into the higher faculties (thus destroying them), or it would offer such a weak and disconnected account of utility so as to reveal its sequestration. It is a Neverland.

There is an inherent conflict among the lower faculties because the state sponsors their practice, whether through governmental or private support. But that conflict is part of the point of the lower faculties, not a structural calamity doomed to undermine them as so many humanists seem to believe. Kant called it a creative conflict, but the philosopher Stephen Palmquist takes things further, interpreting Kant's levels as circular rather than stacked:

The "highness" of theology, law, and medicine connotes a royal calling, a direct link to the "high officials" of the government. The "lowness" of philosophy, by contrast, connotes a direct link with the general public. There are no professional philosophers. ... That is, the academic philosophers is (or should be) like the general public's spy, strategically positioned at the heart of the university in order to collect information and serve as the public's most reliable informant. (from "Philosophers in the Public Square", in Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion)

As Palmquist observes, humanists tend to task themselves with the production of others just like themselves ad infinitum. If we're being generous, we might admit that some humanists play the role of saboteurs, injecting skepticism into future professionals before sending them off to serve the higher interests. But only a minority earnestly begin their quest outside, among the public, relying on contemporary matters as compass-bearings for their intellectual work.

I understand "public" in much broader terms even than Palmquist. It's not just citizens, not just human beings, not just living creatures or even natural orders. The humanities should orient toward the world at large, toward things of all kinds and at all scales. The subject matter for the humanities is not just the letters and arts themselves, but every other worldly practice as well. Any humanistic discipline can orient itself toward the world fruitfully, but most choose to orient inward instead, toward themselves only.

Humanists can be private educators and public spies. But the latter role is far too rare, because humanist intellectuals do not see themselves as practitioners of daily life. Their disparagement comes largely from their own isolation within the institutions that reproduce them, a fate many humanists despise out of one side of their mouths while endorsing it with the other. The humanist corner of the university becomes, in Palmquist's words, "just a safe haven for half-witted thinkers to make a comfortable living."

The humanities needs more courage and more contact with the world. It needs to extend the practice of humanism into that world, rather than to invite the world in for tea and talk of novels, only to pat itself on the collective back for having injected some small measure of abstract critical thinking into the otherwise empty puppets of industry. As far as indispensability goes, we are not meant to be superheroes nor wizards, but secret agents among the citizens, among the scrap metal, among the coriander, among the parking meters. We earn respect by calling in worldly secrets, by making them public. The worldly spy is the opposite of the elbow-patched humanist, the one never out of place no matter the place. The traveler at home everywhere, with the luxury to look.

Source URL: http://www.bogost.com/blog/beyond_the_elbow-patched_playg.shtml
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coding in the humanities | historyproef

One longstanding debate in the Digital Humanities has been the value of teaching programming skills in humanities courses. The main argument in favor of it: 21st century humanists need skills to harness growing amounts of (digital) data. The main argument against: it’s too technical a skill for a methodology that’s largely antithetical to why people go into the humanities.

On this issue I have remained on the fence for some time, but as I continue to experiment with various text mining projects, and continue to fiddle with my digital history course, I am now convinced that basic techniques for data manipulation should be taught as part of the humanities curriculum. Firstly, it’s as fundamental as any other skill related to reading texts (broadly conceived), including sorting and organizing source material. Of course not all humanists use texts as their primary object of inquiry, but because textual sources often feature prominently (if not exclusively) in research, humanists in general have much to gain by learning how to manipulate the growing body of digital texts with simple but powerful tools. Secondly, not only is data manipulation not antithetical to humanistic research methodology, but it facilitates exactly what the humanities are about: embracing multiple perspectives and engaging with source material in multiple ways. As more and more sources become available online as data (not just as images), humanists need tools to manage and explore it. As Ann Blair has recently described of the early modern period, information overload is hardly a new problem. But if the problem of abundance worries the humanist who relies on project-delimiting scarcity, it is a problem to be embraced rather than avoided.

Stephen Ramsay’s provocative post on using the command line (and a follow up) extols the freedom one gains from not being limited to any particular graphical interface. The command line is “faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible than even the most well-thought-out graphical apps.” I fully support Ramsay’s energetic and engaging plea to be more efficient and autonomous with our digital tools. (I often wonder why more people don’t learn simple keyboard shortcuts for things they do all the time…) But his comparison of the command line and graphical interfaces can sound like a replacement argument that may simply be going too far for most humanists. Design matters—especially for new or infrequent tasks and for visual learners—and minimizing the impact of design because the result is faster and simpler does not make processes more efficient in terms of practical use.

Even if I disagree with the extent of Ramsay’s argument, his point about flexibility is spot on. Whether with the command line as he argues, or, as I argue here—with basic tools and techniques for manipulating texts—researchers gain much greater freedom of exploration. Humanists should not be limited to whatever texts are easily viewable, physically or digitally. Nor should they be limited to using only those texts that are digitally findable or available for download. But one cannot simply ignore them. The combinatorial approach is obviously most powerful here. Furthermore, it is no secret that libraries and archives struggle mightily against budget (and many other) constraints to digitize and to make archival and textual data available to us. We cannot also expect them to provide and maintain comprehensive and intuitive interfaces to access and manipulate that data as well.

Is data manipulation really necessary, though? It’s as necessary as any other methodology we learn. Humanists spend inordinate amounts of time learning how to read texts and how to read between the lines in case their research brings them to certain kinds of sources. We learn how to search, how to identify and explore relevant contexts, and how to fairly extrapolate (or do i mean create?) evidence from the tiniest molecule in a primordial semiotic soup. This isn’t limited to literal texts. Images, art, film, games, and of course the conventional text: each of these has ‘textual’ challenges, but we are trained to deal with them to the extent they are relevant for our research interests. But what happens when we have more sources that we can really deal with by hand? Can we just zero in on the sections that are most relevant? What can we see, not with beautiful visualizations, but simply reformatting a text file to highlight different aspects of it? Like reading 10,000 documents 50 different times, looking for something else each time…but in a few hours. Simple scripting tools give us amazingly powerful tools for this—tools that complement methods we already use.

This freedom to explore sources can be wickedly addictive. Recently, after offering some basic CSS training to a former student who was curious but knew nothing about it, I was reminded of one of the reasons that I’ve always enjoyed learning rudimentary scripting languages and why I’m going to teach them from now on: Even the tiniest ability to make a computer do what one wants rather than only what software allows is tremendously empowering. This experience alone could encourage more historians to take up new digital methodologies; the reason for incorporating scripting and manipulation techniques into courses isn’t necessarily to impart any particular technical skill. Learning any particular scripting language is far less important than taking steps to unlock exploratory potential that really allows you to dig into the new kinds of research questions that everyone has been promising for so many years. Unfortunately, it seems that the rhetoric about new possibilities is far more prominent in project grants than in humanities courses. Humanists get excited about complex tools that can do new things, but then lament that they cannot really use them in they way they need to.

Isn’t writing code just too technical for a historian? I could answer ‘no’, but in fact I reject the premise of the question: that somehow the level of difficulty of learning essential methodologies for source material could be a legitimate criterion for what counts as appropriate or necessary. But even if it’s not too technical, isn’t programming just a different kind of job than what the typical humanist does (or wants to do)? It is difficult to believe that someone who can learn to read, if not speak, several languages, decipher cryptic handwriting, analyze abstract concepts and synthesize hundreds if not thousands of complex documents is somehow fundamentally incapable of learning how to string together a handful of instructions that perform simple tasks like finding a certain string in a text file. As Ramsay points out, scripting languages are orders of magnitude simpler than the ones we use everyday and should not be seen as only for elite power users.

Although it may seem pedantic, a distinction between programming and scripting may be useful to lower the entry barrier. I don’t here attempt to construct a rigid philosophical distinction that will hold up at all levels of scrutiny, but one to illustrate my point. Good scripting might be considered as the creative combination of simple and straightforward commands, even if the syntax can get a little ugly. Programming, on the other hand, might be considered as requiring a much higher level of sophistication and complexity, solving much more elaborate problems (security, accessibility, scalability, reusability) that take considerable design and coding experience to accomplish successfully. Of course scripting can get very complicated, and it can be considered a kind of programming. Scripting is like following a recipe, in many ways not unlike the various research methodologies we learn in order to read different kinds of texts. As one learns basic techniques, creative and exploratory potential increases exponentially.

I don’t mean to suggest that teaching programming to historians is a new idea. About three years ago, Bill Turkel and Alan MacEachern published online the “Programming Historian,” which introduced basic python scripting to the historian. Perhaps they were ahead of their time, and historians could not see the value in learning what looks prima facie like a cryptic language. Maybe they simply didn’t consider themselves programmers. At any rate, the discussion about coding continues, and the idea is worth revisiting.

This post is meant to provide the motivation for and introduction to a series of posts that will attempt to explain to historians—especially those without substantial technical experience, but with curiosity and fortitude—how to accomplish some simple scripting tasks like basic web scraping, word frequency analysis, collocation inquiries, and basics reformatting data using publicly available historical sources. The tutorial at large is meant to showcase basic practices that can be reused across a variety of fields and datasets—yet another reason why working with data is more important than ever. Although historical research has used, for example, diaries, newspapers, census records, and of course printed texts in conjunction with each other, these varied sources (especially when used together) have not typically been used at large scales because of practical constraints in terms of gathering and analyzing them. My hope is to walk the user through small exercises that will reveal how easy it is to harness the computer’s tolerance for repetitive drudgery that can be put to good use in humanities research, especially in illustrating how to create and manage ad-hoc collections of historical data.

I have no desire to change the working habits of historians who enjoy whatever processes and tools that allow them to be successful. But it seems that not teaching students the most basic of tools to query a large and ever-expanding subset of source/data does them a fundamental disservice in limiting the kinds of material they can use, the kinds of questions they can ask, and perhaps even the kinds of careers they can have. Whether it can be done well remains to be seen, but it seems both a necessary and fruitful undertaking.

Source URL: http://historyproef.org/blog/teaching/coding-in-the-humanities/
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Harold Bloom on Literary Criticism

How has the profession changed since you began teaching literature?

I've been practicing literary criticism for more than 60 years. In 1976, I resigned from the once splendid Yale English department, which I had joined in 1955, to protest the decline in aesthetic and cognitive standards in the profession. I became a professor of the humanities, a department of one. I have been the pariah of the profession for the last 45 years.

I maintain canonical standards for the study and appreciation of literature. I practice philology and knowledge of the history of language. I do not give in to political considerations, however they mask themselves. All this business about gender, social class, sexual orientation and skin pigmentation is nonsense. I'm 81. I'm not prepared to temporise any more. I've been prophesying like Jeremiah since 1968, warning the profession that it was destroying itself. And it has. There are fewer and fewer people teaching English, or any other kind of literature, in American universities. Students don't wish to study garbage and that's all they're offered.

Forgive me for sounding so strong on this issue. In fact, I'm tired of this polemic so let us change the subject.

Of all the books you've written, The Western Canon arguably made the boldest imprint on the common reader.

I suppose it is true that, facing the decline of a literate audience and desperately trying to battle for canonical standards, my books that have had the widest direct impact were the ones that I addressed to “the common reader” – which was [Samuel] Johnson’s great designation of what a reader should be. I regard myself as a common reader, and I address myself to common readers throughout the world. My books that have made the most impact, and were meant to, are The Western Canon, a huge book called Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a shorter book called How to Read and Why and an enormous book called Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. But that phase of my work is meant to culminate in my new book, TheAnatomy of Influence: Literature As A Way of Life.

Now for the books of others, beginning with a look at the literature of antiquity. Tell us about ER Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational.

You asked me to list five books that continue to influence the profession. But, as I made clear to you, I'm not interested in that any more. I'm interested in the books that have influenced me and will go on influencing me – as I work and teach and write – until I die. Those books include The Greeks and the Irrational, which still has an ongoing influence on me, particularly in my study of Yeats, Hart Crane and other great poets.

The Greeks and the Irrational is an exploration of the daemon, which is Christianised and reduced to demons or devils. But the daemon was a concept, as Dodds makes beautifully clear, having to do with the creative forces in the individual, which are deeper and more pervasive than what you might want to call the mere conscious. Though it's not the unconscious in the Freudian sense, the daemon is the creative spirit. It is, as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson called it, “the God within”.

Dodds applied the psychological theories of the early 20th century to understanding Greek literature. You undertook a similar endeavour inThe Anxiety of Influence. Give us a précis of the theory of literary evolution you developed in that book.

Dodds was profoundly influenced by Freud. I also was deeply influenced by Freud. And for many, many years I was writing a vast commentary on Freud called Transference of Authority. I gave it up because of the ambivalence I began to develop towards him. If I live long enough, I may go back to the manuscript, which is yellowing up in the attic. But at 81, one doesn't know how much time there is, and there are other things I'm writing and want to write.

The theory of literary evolution I developed (which is refined, broadened and made more understandable to the common reader in The Anatomy of Influence) is that literary inheritance, literary genealogy – the cavalcade that takes us from one writer to another, throughout the ages right down to the present moment – is by no means linear. It is based upon agonistic competition. I use the Shakespearean term "misprision", which is a kind of deliberate creativeness. The later work overturns an earlier work in order to get free of it. The new poem, new story, new drama or new novel is a creative misreading of the work that engendered it.

The next book on your list, chronologically, is European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.

This is, I think, the finest work of literary scholarship in my time, by the great German philologist Ernst Robert Curtius. It is an extraordinary study of the continuity of European literature, from Homer and the other Greeks, on through Virgil and the great Latin writers, to a culmination in Dante, and moving beyond to a consideration of a long tradition that concludes with Goethe.

Curtius traces the evolution of language in Italy, in France and in Spain. The middle ages depended heavily on Latin – the vernaculars developed out of it. The greatest instance is Dante, who wrote some of his prose works in Latin but who chose the Tuscan vernacular for much of his work. By his choice, he made it the vehicle for poets who come after him, Boccaccio and Petrarch down through Leopardi and Ungaretti. Without Dante, the language that we all call Italian would not have happened. I prefer Curtius on Dante to the discussion of Dante by any other critic, because he sees that Dante is creating a myth, or even a gnosis, of his own. Ultimately, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas are nowhere near as important as Dante.

It is from Curtius that I have learned – and others go on learning – what literature is, and why I myself would call it a way of life and a way of thought.

In his preface, Curtius calls literature “a reservoir of spiritual energies through which we can flavour and ennoble our present-day life”. Your introduction to The Anatomy of Influence shared a similar view.

I'm so deeply influenced by Ernst Robert Curtius's magnificent book that I probably do owe it to him. But I suppose it all depends how you define “spiritual”. For me, the two great figures of Sir John Falstaff and Hamlet – the great sceptic and nihilist in Shakespeare – offer me spiritual entities of the most intense kind. But then, I’m a heretic. I like to say, “There is no god but god and his name is William Shakespeare.”

Do you individuate from your precursors in your own work?

That's what we're talking about today. I regard ER Dodds, whom I knew personally, as a strong precursor. I never met Ernst Robert Curtius, but we corresponded and I regard him as a forerunner. And then the author of the third book was my own marvellous teacher.

MH Abrams, who wrote The Mirror and the Lamp.

I was a Cornell freshman of 17 when I met Meyer Howard Abrams, MH Abrams, who to this day is my dear friend Mike. I've just turned 81, Mike has just turned 99, but he's alive and well in Ithaca, New York, and still reads and writes with real power. The Mirror and the Lamp, his great book, is a study of the relation between romantic critical theory and a classic of literary scholarship. What MH Abrams demonstrates in The Mirror and the Lamp is the way in which we turned from the renaissance, and classical notions of art as a reflection of nature. Hence the mirror to art as an individual daemonic form, which, like a lamp, sends out its own light, its own ideas and its own exuberance.

Abrams is also thought of as a canoniser. He conceived of The Norton Anthology of English Literature in 1962.

I know. He also wrote another magnificent work of scholarly criticism which has deeply influenced me, Natural Supernaturalism, which carries on the argument of The Mirror and the Lamp. He remains a father figure to me, 18 years older than I am, a mentor and close personal friend.

Your fourth choice is The Rhetoric of Religion.

This is by a forefigure who became a close personal friend and my ultimate mentor, the great American literary theorist Kenneth Burke. His finest and last book, it is a study of Saint Augustine, but even more importantly a study of how the metaphors of the books of Genesis, and the Hebrew bible, individuate themselves. Kenneth Burke was the most remarkable student of rhetoric – that is to say of persuasive argument conducted through tropes and metaphors – of the 20th century. I miss him a great deal. He's been dead for a number of years, though he lived until 96. I hope Mike Abrams goes considerably past that.

Colors of the Mind is the fifth and final book.

Angus Fletcher is my direct contemporary, just a few weeks older than I am, and my lifelong friend. He is alive and well, and I'm glad to say still at work, and he is about as dear a friend as I've had from 1950 until now. He’s written many powerful books, but the one that has influenced me most is this collection of brilliant essays, subtitled “Conjectures on Thinking in Literature”.

What Angus Fletcher taught me, and teaches others, is a very complex matter of what it means for thinking to take place in a literary work. It’s the question of how Shakespeare thinks in his plays and sonnets, of how Henry James thinks in his late, intricate work, or of how Emily Dickinson thinks in her extraordinary poems. I've tried to extend Angus Fletcher’s way of looking at the mind as represented in art to the greatest American poet, Walt Whitman, who thinks through metaphors. My real subject, increasingly, is metaphorical thinking – which is how Shakespeare and all poets and novelists and storywriters think.

Those are the five books. Four of them are by personal friends, and one is by someone I corresponded with. The personal element may have enhanced their influence on me, but I very strongly recommend all five books, not just to whatever real students we still have of literature (and indeed of the other arts) but to common readers who wish to be more deeply educated.

You've observed that, with a few exceptions, criticism has a short shelf life.

Well, there are indeed a few shining exceptions. There's Dr Samuel Johnson. There's William Hazlitt, whom I reread all the time. There's another particular hero of mine, Walter Pater, the great aesthetic critic of the later 19th century. There is my old friend Kenneth Burke.

If I were to be asked, “Harold, can anything in your life's work survive?” I would not know what to answer. I would think that if anything should survive, it would be this new book, because it is my summa. It is my swansong on the question that has occupied me throughout my long life, which is the question of literary and poetic influence. I've written it and rewritten it and cut it down. If anything by me deserves to survive, it's The Anatomy of Influence. Whether it will survive, I have grave doubts. Only a few literary critics survive. Whether I will be one, I do not know.

What are the rewards of reading, and of literary scholarship?

One must read, try to possess by memory, and be possessed by the very best that has been imagined, cognitively apprehended and expressed powerfully. Thinking clearly and well is based upon memory. Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well, and democracy will not survive.

We have this horrible contemporary phenomenon in the Tea Party – a real menace not only to America but to the world. Because if it goes on like this, they will destroy our economy and they will destroy America. They have no democratic vision, and I don't mean with a capital “D”, I mean with a small “d”. They frighten me. They're like the early followers of Adolf Hitler, and I'm willing to be quoted on that. They are a sickening phenomenon. That is because they have not read deeply and widely enough. But then maybe they’re not to blame, because American education – even in elite universities – has become a scandal in my opinion. It has committed suicide.

Interview by
Eve Gerber

Published on Aug 19, 2011

Source url: http://thebrowser.com/interviews/harold-bloom-on-literary-criticism?page=full

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