Abstract

This is the third book in a series which began with The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading. Bloom's name is associated with an influential circle of critics, most from Yale, whose other members are Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. Agon continues Bloom's speculations about questions of literary influence. According to Bloom, writers usurp the achievements of their significant predecessors in order to clear a space for themselves. This is the struggle to which the title refers. His key notion is "misprision," a "deliberately perverse misreading" by which the usurpation is accomplished, and which applies equally to both poets and critics. Bloom expands upon this idea in Agon, which he describes as a blend of his individual religious experience and his professional concerns with literary theory and criticism. The book covers three major topics: the relation between poetic knowledge and Gnosticism, a reading of Freud especially concerned with the Sublime in literature, the poetic will, and a theory of fantasy, and an outline of "the American difference" in poetry and criticism.