This made America open to the successive waves of continental critical theory which have culminated in Deconstruction, the reductio ad absurdum of formalism, which holds that literature, being incapable of referring to anything outside itself, is not for anything.įaced with the ascendancy of such pale-blooded approaches, Bloom has pursued a different path.
In America formalist approaches starting with New Criticism have been concerned with analysing underlying literary structures. Mostly critics have been content with asking: What is literature? British criticism has usually been literary history - explications of texts and of the relationships between them. What should be our central question in approaching literature? The celebrated American literary critic Harold Bloom proposes one: What is literature for? This question may sound obvious, but it is not one with which twentieth century criticism has been much concerned. This is a guest post by Vishvapani, re-published here from an early issue of The Western Buddhist Review.ġ. Introduction: contemporary criticism’s questions and answers
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