In this podcast we talk about the work of Harold Bloom, the greatest literary critic of the 20th century, and the most important American critic since Ralph Waldo Emerson. We still don't really know how to read him, or even for that matter read him, even though things like aesthetics are discussed in academia without even mentioning his name. I think the reason is partly because his work is so mature, and original, that we don't really have frameworks yet for thinking about or understanding it, which puts us in a. weird position, of recognizing that he was the greatest critic of the 20th century, and one of that century's most important thinkers - while also acknowledging that we still only barely understand his work. Bloom contributed not only to the history of literary criticism, like Augustine did in his reading of the Hebrew Bible from a Christian perspective, but also to the disciplines of religion and psychology, and he did this through his theory of the anxiety of influence, and concomitant with that the idea of "misreading" or "misprision." All of Bloom's work can be traced back eventually to Shakespeare, and both influence and misreading are aspects of Bloom's worldview, his way of seeing, which was Shakespearean in the sense of a Nietzchean aesthetic perspectivism, and the valuing of both individuality and the sources and people from which this individuality stems and strives, but which was also permanently and always in a state of mourning about the Holocaust, which happened when Bloom was in his twenties, and which, though he barely wrote about it, was one of the single most important reasons for his work, and an impetus for everything he did. Bloom was as much an ethical critic as an aesthetic one, and all readings of him as some oblivious aesthete ensconced in the tweed-wearing world of academia and the Ivy League are inevitably preposterous readings of a man who saw the world through his own eyes, and changed the nature of how we read forever.