Amüsanter Generalangriff auf den Kritiker Harold Bloom von Jason Epstein. Zitate:

In an interview in the Paris Review, he declared that he never revises his prose, and nothing in his work refutes this impressive claim.
[...]
One has the sense that everything Bloom writes he has probably said before, scores, perhaps hundreds of times, to students; it all comes out of that great booming Bloombox, the academic equivalent of a great Boombox, but this one with no Off switch and no control whatsoever over the volume.
[...]
The mystery is that Harold Bloom, for all his nearly perfect unreadability, today finds himself in that small but lucky elite of writers whose books sell without being actually read. I have been plowing my way through Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human for weeks now, and I can only report that it is difficult to imagine anyone reading through it who has not been paid to write about it. The Shakespeare book, too, has a large, useless idea at its center—namely, that Shakespeare invented our feelings and way of feeling and so, through his plays, invented (or, as Bloom sometimes says, “reinvented”) human personality. Reading Bloom on this point is, as John Carey, writing in the Times of London, puts it, “like chatting with an acquaintance and gradually realizing he believes death rays are issuing from his television screen.”

Das ist schon witzig aber, wie das bei solchen Totalabrechnungen meistens der Fall ist, auch ungerecht. Obwohl...das Gerede von "Gender- und Powerfreaks" (diesen Ausdruck gebraucht er an anderer Stelle) nehme ich Bloom schon etwas übel.