I've never understood Bloom's reputation, though I don't know his
work in detail. He seems given to enfant terrible pronouncemnets with
very little to back them up, as in his conviction that one of the
wrtters of Genesis was a woman. And that silly influenceanxiety idea.
Or the one about human self-consciousness--not its depiction, but the
thing itself--beginning with Hamlet.
A recent essay of his in the NYRB, On the Glories of Yiddish, was
barely coherent. It's at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22020.
Here's something that comes across loud and clear: whether or not
he's paraphrasing the book under review when he says that "Yiddish
and Middle Rhenish German are utterly distinct languages," he
apparently thinks it's so. This is palpably ridiculous--the grammar
and most of the vocabulary are identical, and it's possible to
navigate Germany using Yiddish carefully, avoiding Hebrew and Slavic
words. I watched my mother do this years ago.
Mark
At 10:09 AM 11/12/2008, you wrote:
>I tend to associate Bloom with an inept commentary shoehorned onto
>Erdman's excellent edition of Blake.
>
>Robin
>
>{I was tempted to add, "Hermes Trismegistus, thou shouldst be living
>at this hour," but having been Offticked for obscurity, I decided to refrain.
>
>R.}
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