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“... de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he ...”

“... his misogyny, his conservatism, his theological bad faith, the gratuitousness of his language. To Harold Bloom, Updike is ‘a minor writer with a major style’. Gore Vidal thinks that Updike ‘describes to no purpose’. James Wood complains that Updike fills his characters’ thoughts with showy phrases that don’t suit them or their situations; and ...”

“... influences and precursors? Bois gets around the first prohibition with an unexpected reference to Harold Bloom, who argued in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) that influence flows both ways, that the latecomer can affect the predecessor too; ‘a spark between poles’ is how Bois phrases it. (T.S. Eliot had made much the same claim several decades before ...”

“... read Rorty, we know that Freud’s a ‘strong poet’ and that, swerve and dribble as we may with Harold Bloom, we can’t escape his influence. Anyway, the goal posts are contingent, and an irritable reaching after fact and reason, like Gellner’s, is doomed from the start. Thus Leo Bersani shuns ‘verification’ and finds in late Freud a discourse ...”

“... of his greatest work, most of his verse is of minor value, either too much in the mode of what Harold Bloom called ‘whooping’ or else mere occasional verse, poetastry. But many of even the least ambitious poems, as Holmes and Paley show, are fresh and sharp and witty, and within the shadow of the much anthologised pieces a reader can find poems ...”

“... with ‘Yale’ – the diverse things which a remarkable constellation of original critics, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and the late Paul de Man, were already doing before Derrida came along to join them). Derrida did write some things which encouraged the belief that he had discovered a brand-new whiz-bang method of finding ...”

“... the use of parody in this book was also, for me, a way of coping with what the American critic Harold Bloom has called the ‘anxiety of influence’: the sense every young writer must have of the daunting weight of the literary tradition he has inherited, the necessity and yet seeming impossibility of doing something in writing that has not been done ...”

“... undergraduate, a student who has eagerly assimilated the ideas of various important critics (here Harold Bloom on the influence of Marlowe, Peter Conrad on Shakespeare and Romantic opera, Michael Bristol on the ‘culture wars’) without thinking very hard about either their implications or their compatibility. (It’s manifestly counter-productive, for ...”

“... as well as Shoshana Felman and Barbara Johnson), but also linked to other Yale critics, notably Harold Bloom, Peter Brooks, Geoffrey Hartman and Fredric Jameson. In the decades since then, Miller’s work has continued to evolve, often along paths marked out by Derrida. (Derrida moved from Yale to Irvine in California when Miller moved there in the ...”

“... in a metal pipe has the makings of becoming a better world for us all. I Love Dick, surely, stands Harold Bloom-like behind that sous-chef, whether writers are consciously aware of it or not. It’s interesting to consider how the internet fits in with all this – in its commercial infancy when I Love Dick was first published and not mentioned at all in ...”

“... eternal appeal ranging from Ruskin to Beckett to Seamus Heaney to that American avatar of Johnson, Harold Bloom, who places Johnson’s literary criticism within the ‘ancient genre of wisdom writing’. Focusing on only a ‘portion of Johnson … the moralist and critic’ (though he could be described as a moralist in almost all of his ...”

“... seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British Literature advocated ...”

“... constructive) preface that the authors are not entirely at one, that Professor Bloom and he, for example, are probably not deconstructionist mafiosi at all. And it is true that the former does mention one or two difficulties about a view of literature that seems unable to distinguish any particular work from any other, though he does so ...”

“... poems, and one’s self, will just be better or worse instances of familiar types. This is what Harold Bloom calls ‘the strong poet’s anxiety of influence’, his or her ‘horror of finding oneself to be only a copy or a replica’. On this reading of Larkin’s poem, what would it be to have succeeded in tracing home the ‘blind impress’ which ...”

“... must be a history of misreadings’ uncannily echoes the insistence of their successor at Yale, Harold Bloom, that criticism and poetry alike depend on ‘creative misunderstanding’. Yet given The Anxiety of Influence’s lofty indifference to the mechanics of bibliographical transmission, it’s characteristically mischievous for McKenzie to ...”