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Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, The American Religion, and The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Catalonia International Prize, and Mexico's Alfonso Reyes International Prize. He lives in New Haven.
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What inspired you to write How To Read and Why?
With both The Western Canon published back in 1994 and
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human published in 1998, I had toured
extensively and found an astonishing response from the audiences I addressed and
from people who talked to me and people for whom I was signing books. To this
day, I am deluged with mail from people who say how desperately pleased they are
to find that someone is indeed writing about literature for the common reader,
that someone does not try, as it were, to do the French thing, in regard to
literary study or the many ideological modes which I will not mention, which are
now practiced in the Anglo-American Universities and college world.
The more I thought about the response to these two books I
had written, the more I realized that neither of them had really addressed a
need which I felt highly qualified and highly driven to meet. And that is, a
self-help book, indeed, an inspiration book, which would not only encourage
solitary readers of all kinds all over the world to go on reading for
themselves, but also support them in their voyages of self-discovery through
reading. [How To Read and Why is meant to] give readers a human aid to their...
Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
How To Read And Why
Try:
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
by Pierre Bayard
Ronald B. Shwartz is a Boston trial lawyer and former editor of The University of Chicago Law Review. He has edited three books of quotations and has written essays and reviews that have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
How To Read And Why
Try:
For The Love Of Books
by Ronald B. Shwartz
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Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
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