Darkness at Noon

by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Overview

Set in the turbulent Soviet Union of the 1930s, Darkness at Noon tells the story of its Jewish hero and protagonist, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov. Unjustly accused of treason, Rubashov is forced to endure the nightmare of imprisonment and eventual execution for the crime with which he is charged. Rubashov's tragedy is that of an intellectual insider suddenly made outsider to the party he once supported. Through a series of interrogations by Ivanov, a former comrade in arms, and Gletkin, a young zealot, Rubashov is forced to examine the consequences of his previous adherence to a doctrine dedicated to its own fulfillment at all costs to ethics and freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791075807
Publisher:	Infobase Publishing
Publication date:	07/28/2003
Series:	Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	150
Product dimensions:	6.34(w) x 9.52(h) x 0.91(d)
Age Range:	9 Years

About the Author

"Authentic literature doesn't divide us," the scholar and literary critic Harold Bloom once said. "It addresses itself to the solitary individual or consciousness." Revered and sometimes reviled as a champion of the Western canon, Bloom insists on the importance of reading authors such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer -- not because they transmit certain approved cultural values, but because they transcend the limits of culture, and thus enlarge rather than constrict our sense of what it means to be human. As Bloom explained in an interview, "Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage."

Bloom began his career by tackling the formidable legacy of T.S. Eliot, who had dismissed the English Romantic poets as undisciplined nature-worshippers. Bloom construed the Romantic poets' visions of immortality as rebellions against nature, and argued that an essentially Romantic imagination was still at work in the best modernist poets.

Having restored the Romantics to critical respectability, Bloom advanced a more general theory of poetry. His now-famous The Anxiety of Influence argued that any strong poem is a creative "misreading" of the poet's predecessor. The book raised, as the poet John Hollander wrote, "profound questions about... how the prior visions of other poems are, for a true poet, as powerful as his own dreams and as formative as his domestic childhood." In addition to developing this theory, Bloom wrote several books on sacred texts. In The Book of J, he suggested that some of the oldest parts of the Bible were written by a woman.

The Book of J was a bestseller, but it was the 1994 publication of The Western Canon that made the critic-scholar a household name. In it, Bloom decried what he called the "School of Resentment" and the use of political correctness as a basis for judging works of literature. His defense of the threatened canon formed, according to The New York Times, a "passionate demonstration of why some writers have triumphantly escaped the oblivion in which time buries almost all human effort."

Bloom placed Shakespeare along with Dante at the center of the Western canon, and he made another defense of Shakespeare's centrality with Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, an illuminating study of Shakespeare's plays. How to Read and Why (2000) revisited Shakespeare and other writers in the Bloom pantheon, and described the act of reading as both a spiritual exercise and an aesthetic pleasure.

Recently, Bloom took up another controversial stance when he attacked Harry Potter in an essay for The Wall Street Journal. His 2001 book Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages advanced an alternative to contemporary children's lit, with a collection of classic works of literature "worthy of rereading" by people of all ages.

The poet and editor David Lehman said that "while there are some critics who are known for a certain subtlety and a certain judiciousness, there are other critics... who radiate ferocious passion." Harold Bloom is a ferociously passionate reader for whom literary criticism is, as he puts it, "the art of making what is implicit in the text as finely explicit as possible."

Hometown:

New York, New York and New Haven, Connecticut

Date of Birth:

July 11, 1930

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., Cornell University, 1951; Ph.D., Yale University, 1955

Table of Contents

	Editor's Note	vii
	Introduction	1
	The Function of Rubashov's Toothache in Koestler's Darkness at Noon	3
	Darkness at Noon and the 'Grammatical Fiction'	15
	Arthur Koestler: On Messiahs and Mutations	31
	Darkness at Noon	49
	The Mind on Trial: Darkness at Noon	65
	Viewpoints and Voices: Serge and Koestler on the Great Terror	83
	Orwell versus Koestler: Nineteen Eighty-Four as Optimistic Satire	109
	Darkness at Noon and the Political Novel	121
	The "Post-Colonialism" of Cold War Discourse	131
	Comment on an Aspect of Pietz's Argument	153
	Eternity in Darkness at Noon and the Consolation of Philosophy	161
	War, 1938-42	177
	A Cold War Best-Seller: The Reaction to Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon in France from 1945 to 1950	223
	Chronology	235
	Contributors	239
	Bibliography	243
	Acknowledgments	247
	Index	249