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Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
215 pages, Library Binding
First published January 1, 1986
About the author
Harold Bloom
1,719 books2,163 followersHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 2, 2010
I recently entered into a passionate but dysfunctional relationship with Gertrude Stein; I’m talking jealous rages, smashed crockery, an endless stream of plaintive text messages, the whole bit. And that’s all on my side. She mostly just sits there, smiling enigmatically. It’s maddening.
So I badly needed to get some emotional distance between that kooky chick and me. Hence, Gertrude Stein: Modern Critical Views, a collection of essays on Stein and her work.
For me, picking up a scholarly thingamajig edited by Harold Bloom amounts to a confession of hermeneutic failure. Not to sound persnickety, but Modern Critical Views is the series that clueless undergrads turn to when they need to bullshit their way through a paper on James Joyce or whomever. And not to sound even more persnickety, but MCV jumped the academic shark the moment it ran out of canonical writers to dust off and started hoovering up such middle-brow crumbs as Amy Tan and John Le Carré (old Bloom must be tossing uneasily in his Craftmatic Adjustable.)
But enough snark. The essays here are arranged chronologically, and it’s interesting to see how the evasiveness of the earliest contributors gives way to the self-confident theorizing of the later ones. Like laws and sausages, though, a critical consensus is not something you want to watch take shape. The whole process is reminiscent of embalming: you end up with a lovely corpse, but it’s still a corpse.
I highly doubt that anyone still reading this review gives two shits about the actual contents of Gertrude Stein, so you can go ahead and skip this paragraph and come in at the end for my big dance number. Fickle-ass motherfuckers. (Just seeing if you were still with me.) Okay, then, a few highlights from the book: Edmund Wilson admitting he wasn’t able to get through The Making of Americans and more or less daring his readers to try; Katherine Anne Porter saying: 'There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about each other, the rest is decoration and prejudice’; B.L. Reid suggesting that Stein’s aesthetic theories are just plain dumb; pretty much everything Thornton Wilder has to say. The one indisputable low point: William H. Gass’s pompous, blustering analysis of Tender Buttons. The guy’s so wrong, and yet so secure in his interpretive hubris, it’s like, awe-inspiring.
Unfortunately, my own feelings about Stein remain unchanged: i.e. messed up. Tender Buttons found me at just the right time and hit me like a revelation; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was fun and gossipy but essentially frivolous; and some of Stein’s more daring syntactical experiments sound to me—and many others—like the prattling of a not-very-bright toddler, minus the cuteness. But what the hell?--I’m sticking with her. As long as more conventional writers, for whatever reason, can’t give me what I need, I’ll go with the brilliant and freaky lesbian.
This isn’t going to end well, is it?
So I badly needed to get some emotional distance between that kooky chick and me. Hence, Gertrude Stein: Modern Critical Views, a collection of essays on Stein and her work.
For me, picking up a scholarly thingamajig edited by Harold Bloom amounts to a confession of hermeneutic failure. Not to sound persnickety, but Modern Critical Views is the series that clueless undergrads turn to when they need to bullshit their way through a paper on James Joyce or whomever. And not to sound even more persnickety, but MCV jumped the academic shark the moment it ran out of canonical writers to dust off and started hoovering up such middle-brow crumbs as Amy Tan and John Le Carré (old Bloom must be tossing uneasily in his Craftmatic Adjustable.)
But enough snark. The essays here are arranged chronologically, and it’s interesting to see how the evasiveness of the earliest contributors gives way to the self-confident theorizing of the later ones. Like laws and sausages, though, a critical consensus is not something you want to watch take shape. The whole process is reminiscent of embalming: you end up with a lovely corpse, but it’s still a corpse.
I highly doubt that anyone still reading this review gives two shits about the actual contents of Gertrude Stein, so you can go ahead and skip this paragraph and come in at the end for my big dance number. Fickle-ass motherfuckers. (Just seeing if you were still with me.) Okay, then, a few highlights from the book: Edmund Wilson admitting he wasn’t able to get through The Making of Americans and more or less daring his readers to try; Katherine Anne Porter saying: 'There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about each other, the rest is decoration and prejudice’; B.L. Reid suggesting that Stein’s aesthetic theories are just plain dumb; pretty much everything Thornton Wilder has to say. The one indisputable low point: William H. Gass’s pompous, blustering analysis of Tender Buttons. The guy’s so wrong, and yet so secure in his interpretive hubris, it’s like, awe-inspiring.
Unfortunately, my own feelings about Stein remain unchanged: i.e. messed up. Tender Buttons found me at just the right time and hit me like a revelation; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was fun and gossipy but essentially frivolous; and some of Stein’s more daring syntactical experiments sound to me—and many others—like the prattling of a not-very-bright toddler, minus the cuteness. But what the hell?--I’m sticking with her. As long as more conventional writers, for whatever reason, can’t give me what I need, I’ll go with the brilliant and freaky lesbian.
This isn’t going to end well, is it?
Displaying 1 of 1 review