Harold Bloom - Criticism and Controversy

Criticism and Controversy

James Wood has described Bloom as "Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own — a kind of campiness, in fact — Bloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant." Bloom responded to questions about Wood in an interview by saying: "There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away ... There’s nothing to the man. .. I don't want to talk about him".

In the early 21st century, Bloom has often found himself at the center of literary controversy after criticizing popular writers such as Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, Stephen King,, David Foster Wallace, and J. K. Rowling. In the pages of the Paris Review, he criticized the populist-leaning poetry slam, saying: "It is the death of art." When Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he bemoaned the "pure political correctness" of the award to an author of "fourth-rate science fiction."

In a February 2004 article in New York magazine, "The Silent Treatment," Naomi Wolf accused Bloom, her former professor, of having "sexually encroached" on her when she was a Yale undergraduate, by touching her thigh. Although she acknowledged that what she alleged Bloom did was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, she claimed to have harbored this secret for 21 years. Bloom declined to comment on the matter.

MormonVoices, a group associated with Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research, included Bloom on its Top Ten Anti-Mormon Statements of 2011 list for stating "The current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as 'prophet, seer and revelator,' is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy".