American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Bloom drew from Nietzsche as a theorist of intellectual belatedness and indebtedness and an exemplar of the poetic burden of the critic. Whether challenging the New Critics’ overspiritualization of criticism and its insistence on the hermetic closure of texts in the 1960s; deconstructionists’ radical despiritualization of criticism and celebration of radical indeterminacy with the “death of the author” in the 1970s; or the move from literary criticism to cultural studies, and with it the politicization of texts by their cultural studies offspring in the 1980s and ’90s, Bloom upbraided the literary critic as knower of truth. In his view, his precursors approached texts as if they could be certain of their meaning, while his contemporaries and their students approach texts with a certainty that there was no meaning whatsoever. But in Bloom’s estimation, both kinds of literary critics are bedeviled by the same problem: they may have questions, but they have no quest. Both seek knowledge, but not wisdom.