HOW TO READ AND WHY

A new book by America’s leading literary critic on the uses of deep reading. Practical inspirational and learned How to Read and Why is Bloom’s manifesto for the preponderance of written culture.In the vastly influential The Western Canon Harold Bloom outlined what we should read to understand a greater depth of the individual self. How to Read and Why continues the argument and focusses on how we use literature in order to gain deeper self-awareness. Poems stories novels plays and parables are all analysed as forms of writing as immersion the language of individuality and inwardness: Shakespeare’s sonnets the short stories of Hemingway and de Cervantes the novels of Proust and Calvino Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Mark’s Gospel. Harold Bloom also addresses the idea of why we read: increased individuality respite from visual bombardment a return to ‘deep feeling’ and ‘deep thinking’.How to Read and Why is an essential book for any reader an introduction to the world of written culture an inspirational self-help book for students and teachers alike.