Why Read Literature According to Harold Bloom?
Why Read Literature According to Harold Bloom?

Summary/Abstract: This essay examines Harold Bloom’s apology for reading literature by focusing on his How to Read and Why (2000), though not limited to this book. One of the main motifs implied in Bloom’s works as why we (should) read literature is inwardness. There is something very Hamletian about inwardness, thus I discuss Bloom with a constant reference to Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet-like inwardness, or what Bloom occasionally calls deep subjectivity, is the possible outcome of a lifetime’s deep reading. As an aesthete, Bloom celebrates the solitary reader and brackets off history and politics, apparently to attend to the metamorphosis of the individual’s mind. Hamlet’s self-overhearing is the psychic scene of instruction and change, the possibilities of which can be extended to the act of reading. For Bloom, Hamlet’s inwardness is a paradigm for all reading. Fully knowing many people is almost impossible, and reading, as implied by Bloom, is attuning to a particular human experience, which also entails encountering the unexpected otherness of our own many selves. The aura of mystery about knowing others/ourselves to which Bloom pledges is rooted in his deep humanism.

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