Bloom’s Shortcomings as a Public Critic: Shakespeare and the Aesthetic

A new working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/130317867/Blooms_Shortcomings_as_a_Public_Critic_Shakespeare_and_the_Aesthetic
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5337721
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393362370_Bloom's_Shortcomings_as_a_Public_Critic_Shakespeare_and_the_Aesthetic

Abstract: This paper reexamines Harold Bloom’s famous claim that Shakespeare “invented the human,” treating it as a provocative intuition rather than a defensible thesis. While Bloom’s brilliance is undeniable, his critical method often falters in its lack of precision, dialogue, and systematic argument. His assertions remain suggestive rather than demonstrable, his central ideas never quite articulated in a form that others could test, extend, or refine.

Bloom’s insights can benefit from a broader historical and conceptual framework, drawing on the founder effect, the rise of the nation-state, and changes in the structure of family life to explain how Shakespeare’s works came to resonate so powerfully—and why that resonance was institutionalized in canon formation. Rather than dismissing Bloom’s view outright, the argument reframes it: Shakespeare was not uniquely responsible for modern subjectivity, but his plays became a particularly vivid site where evolving ideas of inwardness, identity, and public/private distinction found artistic form.

A substantial portion of the paper engages in a sustained dialogue with Claude 3.5, a large language model. This conversation serves as both a critical method and a philosophical thought experiment, probing Bloom’s aesthetic commitments through Kantian theory, Huizinga’s concept of play, and Edward Said’s reflections on the autonomous aesthetic. The exchange reveals not only the tension between Bloom’s aesthetic absolutism and his resistance to theory, but also the possibility of reconciling aesthetic and cultural criticism through new tools and vocabularies.

The paper concludes by proposing that modern computational techniques—including large-scale textual analysis and cultural analytics—offer a way to redeem and complete Bloom’s project. Where Bloom intuited transformations in the representation of consciousness, digital tools may now be able to trace those transformations empirically, revealing Shakespeare’s influence not as an abstract myth but as a legible pattern across literary history. This is not an argument against Bloom, but an effort to carry his vision beyond its limits and into a new critical era.

If you carry the major British and American poets around with you by internalization, after some years their complex relations to one another begin to form enigmatic patterns.

–Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence

Contents

Harold Bloom, Brilliant and Intuitive, but not Great 3
About this document 4
About the title page image 5
Harold Bloom on Shakespeare's greatness 6
Bloom on Shakespeare [persistence of identity] 8
What does evolution have to teach us about Shakespeare’s reputation? 10
The founder effect 10
Shakespeare and the invention of the modern 11
Twice a founder 15
Claude has some ideas about how we could revise and redeem Harold Bloom 16
Kant, Huizinga, and the Aesthetic 17
Edward Said on a separate aesthetic realm 21
Bloom’s mode of thinking 24
The Value of Computational Techniques 28

Harold Bloom, Brilliant and Intuitive, but not Great

I’ve known about Harold Bloom for most of my career. I read The Anxiety of Influence sometime in the 1970s, thought it interesting, but also peculiar, wrote a letter to Dick Macksey about it, and then set it aside. By that time I had committed to cognitive science so Bloom had little to say to me. As fas as I was concerned, that was pretty much it for Bloom. I read a review or two of The Western Canon, but saw no need to read it, and I thumbed through Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, in a bookstore, but that was it.

Then, in October, 2023, Tyler Cowen published a book, Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? So I decided that I’d take a crack at identifying the greatest literary critics of all time. I went at it rather casually, intending no more than one or two or three posts, certainly no more. But the enterprise stuck to me and kept posting and posting. As I’m doubtful of this GOAT business, the project morphed into a look at the conceptual boundaries of the contemporary academic discipline of literary criticism: Who are the major figures marking those boundaries? After running through a half-dozen or so important figures – Coleridge, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Northrop Frye, Renee Girard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jacques Derrida – I found myself staring at the specter of Harold Bloom. What was I to do about Bloom? He’d all but abandoned the profession by the 1990s, but was the literary critic most visible to the general public. How well did he serve that public?

I decided to take another look at him. I looked through the second edition of The Anxiety of Influence, with its new and rather long preface. I picked up both The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, but was unable to bring myself to read either of those in full. Rather I read the opening and closing sections of both, figuring that’s where I’d find whatever general thoughts Bloom had on those subjects, and read around here and there in both books, looking for this and that. I also looked at some other books, most especially his late book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, read some interviews, and read a bunch of stuff about him. I reached the conclusion that he may well have been as brilliant a literary critic as we’ve seen since World War II, but that he was not a great critic.

In making this distinction I am thinking of brilliance as property of a person’s mind while greatness is a property of the work they produced. To the extent that I can judge such things, Bloom is as brilliant a critic as I’ve read. But I am unable to think of his work as being great. He may have read “everything,” and been able to quote it from memory at the drop of a hat, and he may have felt deeply about it all, but he was also enormously self-indulgent and, in the end, undisciplined.

There’s another distinction we need to make as well, a somewhat more obscure and delicate one. I want to distinguish between attitudes, ideas, behavior we can attribute to Bloom as a result of internalizing the norms of practices of academic literary criticism as he encountered them early in his career in the 1950a, and the attitudes, ideas, behavior more properly attributed to Bloom’s personal inclinations. It is clear that he stayed within those early disciplinary boundaries, though he realized them with a flamboyance attributable to his personal style.

Had Bloom gone beyond those boundaries in ways I indicate in this paper, then he might well have achieved greatness. The public deserved at least that. Instead of construing himself as a sage, oracle, and magister, to use an archaic word, he should have acted as disciplined and thoughtful man of reason. As it is, he’s left us with brilliant and often pompous mediocrity.

About this document

This working paper looks at his failings with respect to Shakespeare and to literature as aesthetic experience. His major claim about Shakespeare, which is about the self in Shakespeare’s characters and the importance of those characters in Western culture, is implicitly an empirical one, but he never provides us with empirical evidence. As for the aesthetic, he offers The Western Canon as an account of the aesthetic value of those books, rather than reducing them to matters of historical accident, as he claims is done in “the School of Resentment,” but he never offers an account of what the aesthetic is and why it is important. Gesturing toward Kant is not sufficient. The general reading public deserved more than Harold Bloom’s deeply held opinions on these matters. They deserved actual evidence and arguments. Those seemed beneath Bloom. They weren’t necessary to criticism as he’d internalized it.

In the first three sections I look at Bloom’s ideas about Shakespeare. While I freely grant the had an important insight about Shakespeare, as I’ve already indicated, he failed to develop that insight through empirical evidence. Had Bloom undertaken the kind or empirical work I suggest in the first and third sections he might thereby have become a great critic, the more so because that work could easily have been made access to the general educated public to which he addressed himself since the 1990s. In this I think he was inhibited by now archaic professional decorum. He didn’t have and didn’t want to develop the conceptual tools to do anything else.

Harold Bloom on Shakespeare's greatness – I quote from a 1991 Paris Review interview where Bloom talks about his central insight into Shakespeare. I grant him the insight but suggest that he needs to offer empirical evidence.

Bloom on Shakespeare [persistence of identity] – This might seem like an extended kvetch on Bloom’s use of the word “invention” in the title of his book. And, yes, it IS that. But Bloom’s always doing this, using big words in vague ways that free him from the necessity of actually thinking. Richard Levine notes that a number of writers have been credited with inventing “the human.”

What does evolution have to teach us about Shakespeare’s reputation? – In this section I present some conceptual equipment one can use to conceptualize the significance of Shakespeare’s position in the canon. First I present some ideas by Oleg Sobchuk, a young scholar interested in cultural evolution. Then I present some of my own work on Shakespeare which considers his work in relationship to changes in family structure.

The last section is an extended conversation I had with Claude, an AI chatbot, about Bloom’s work:

Claude has some ideas about how we could revise and redeem Harold Bloom – I start with Bloom’s insistence on the “aesthetic value” of the works he studies in The Western Canon, noting that he says little about what that is and why it is important and so never demonstrates how those works exhibit these specifically aesthetic qualities. I suggest that he might have developed an explicit account around the ideas in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938). Claude and I develop that a bit and then bring up Edward Said, of the so-called “School of Resentment,” pointing out that, like Bloom, he also believed in aesthetic value. Perhaps, I suggest to Claude, “Bloom would have been a better public critic if he had other critics to argue with in the public sphere.” From there we move to Bloom’s mode of thought, where he seems to be drowning in text fragments he’s memorized while at the same time avoiding the rigors of abstract conceptualization. We end with some remarks about the computational techniques that have been developed in literary criticism in this millennium.

About the title page image

ChatGPT created the image. I uploaded the body of this document and asked it to create a suitable image. It then gave me a program for the image and proceeded to create it. Here’s the program it devised for the image:

Title: No title text on the image (per your past preferences).

Visual Concept:

• Foreground: A seated figure evoking Harold Bloom, surrounded by a swirling vortex of books and fragments of text. His expression is intense, even haunted—brilliant but trapped in the very canon he champions.
v • Midground: A spectral image of Shakespeare, partially formed from calligraphic script and glowing lightly, gazing not at Bloom but past him—into the future. Shakespeare is not deified but ambiguous, generative.
• Background: A fractured library wall fading into digital abstraction—half Renaissance study, half neural net latticework—symbolizing both the literary past and the computational future you gesture toward in the essay.
• Symbolic Elements:

o A spiral or circular motif suggesting ring-composition, subtly present in the background architecture or cloud patterns.
o A long scroll unrolling from Bloom’s hands, but frayed at the end, being caught by an invisible wind.
o A single paragraph of text from Heart of Darkness visually highlighted mid-image, embedded in the swirl.