Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age.

Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the reading adventure of a lifetime with

hardcore literature.

Hello and welcome back to Hardcore Literature.

I hope you're doing well and I hope your reading is going well.

Today we have a very special show, a show that I have been looking forward to for so long.

We are talking about the anxiety of influence by Harold Bloom.

If you have listened to these shows for a little bit of time, you will have encountered

Harold Bloom's name a few times. I thought we were long overdue for a Bloom-specific

show. The only thing that proved to be a brief and minor stumbling block was deciding which of Bloom's

many books to focus on and explicate because Harold Bloom was incredibly

prolific. He has a number of great books. But after a little bit of deliberation, after running my

fingers across the spines of the blooms on my shelves and of course cracking them open all over again,

I thought we must read and explicate the anxiety of influence for a few reasons.

Bloom reminds us that Heidegger said that a great man must think one thought through all the way to the end one thought and only one

thought and harold blooms one thought was influence and one of the things i've noticed is those who are

acquainted with harold blo's theory of influence,

...