JOHNSON CITY – Shakespeare claimed “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” but literary critics have found that his works, unlike a rose, can be viewed many ways and evaluators arrive at very different conclusions.
Renowned critic Harold Bloom, in his work, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, created a stir in literary circles by renouncing the ways late twentieth-century scholars look at Shakespeare from such perspectives as feminism, Marxism and post-modernism, preferring a return to an earlier focus on the text. Studying Juliet's words in Romeo and Juliet according to this theory is more valuable than considering the reasons behind her words by looking at her society, time period, or feminine viewpoint.
Bloom explained his philosophy in The Western Canon by saying, “I am your true Marxist critic, following Groucho rather than Karl, and take as my motto Groucho's grand admonition: 'Whatever it is, I'm against it.'”
Shakespearean scholars from diverse backgrounds and geographic locations have reacted to Bloom's work with their own responses to the challenge his book presented. During the 2000 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, a seminar was devoted to responses to Bloom's book. The seminar stirred such interest that The New York Times carried a report on the event.
The two leaders of the seminar, Dr. Robert Sawyer of East Tennessee State University, and Dr. Christy Desmet of the University of Georgia, recently edited and released a collection of those responses, Harold Bloom's Shakespeare.
The volume, published by Palgrave, a new global imprint of St. Martin's Press, is described by the publisher as offering “a fresh look at literary history and suggest[ing] new directions being taken by leading literary theorists.”
Early reviewers have called the volume everything from a “fascinating and delightful read” with “groundbreaking and reasoned essays” to a “timely” and “invigorating book.”
Sawyer, an assistant professor of English at ETSU, collaborated with Desmet previously in Shakespeare and Appropriation. He is currently finishing a forthcoming book, Mid-Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare: George Eliot, Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Charles Dickens, which will be released by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Desmet teaches Shakespeare, rhetoric and early modern literature at the University of Georgia and is the author of Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity.
For further information, contact Sawyer at (423) 439-6670 or RESAWYER1@msn.com.