Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Form, Content, and the Bloomian process of Misprision

After reading Boris Eichenbaum's From The Theory of the "Formal Method," I couldn't help but perceive a connection between the formalist concern with literary history, and Harold Bloom's interest in how poem begets poem. Eichenbaum tells us that after the publication of Shklovsky's essay, "we found that we could not see the literary work in isolation, that we had to see its form against a background of other works rather than by itself" (973).

Eichenbaum also informs us that Shklovsky says that "the more you understand an age, the more convinced you become that the images a given poet used and which you thought his own were taken almost unchanged from another poet ... poets are much more concerned with arranging images than creating them" (933). In other words, there is no such thing as new content, just new form. What would Bloom have to say about this? If "every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem" (1658), could we say that the Bloomian process of misprision is simply a reorganization of form in order to express the same content as the precursor poem?

Dan

1 comment:

  1. I think Bloom would allow that sometimes misinterpreted poems sometimes change content; poem with reorganized structure would imply te meaning is the same and I think Bloom does not argue that reimagined works have the same meaning.

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