Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category
When America’s foremost literary critic, Harold Bloom, professor emeritus at Yale was asked to define literary greatness, he did so as follows,
“I have tried to confront greatness directly: to ask what makes the author and the works canonical. The answer, more often than not, turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange. Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty…when you read a canonical work for the first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectation. {The great works} have in common their uncaniness, their ability to make you feel strange at home.”