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Title: New Critic - same old song and dance.
Review: As America's major 'bookchat' academics, Bloom's latest, 'How to Read and Why', is disturbing and disapointing. If I can be so bold, the book is also hypocritical, stating to leave 'ideology' out of one's reading of literature, by and while pushing the stance that all modern works inevitably lead back to Rome; in this case, William Shakespeare. The curious Kabalist treatise at the end, an ideology in and of itself, is quite disturbing. He damns ideology while pushing his own. Literary criticism has moved on Mr. Bloom. We've discovered it is worthwhile analysing historical context as well as irony, paradox, etc. One can study outside the text as well as the text itself and still enjoy or be inspired or change one's view of existence for the better. Interestingly, I had thought the 'New Critic' school was long gone, or at least incorporated into criticism overall, only to find the old boy's still around. Pushing the same old arguments, the same old song and dance.
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