Word: bloomings
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...Jane Ira Bloom...
...Allan Bloom, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, deplores the study of non-traditional subjects in the university--such as popular culture. Yet he is also fiercely critical of the effects of popular entertainment on modern American youth. In The Closing of The American Mind, Bloom rants against the corrosive influence of mass media, saying, "Life is made into a non-stop, commercially pre-packaged, masturbational fantasy." An interesting point--but one that would have been better informed by a knowledge of scholarly theory on popular culture...
...just any woman. According to Bloom, the God of these passages is "the West's major literary character," and the author's achievement is "comparable in imagination and rhetoric" only to that of Shakespeare and a few other writers. Bloom's case is laid out in The Book of J (Grove Weidenfeld; $21.95), on sale this week. "J" (for Jahwist or Yahwist) is the label scholars give to one of the hypothetical documents from which the Pentateuch was compiled and to its author or authors. Bloom's commentary appears with a new translation of J passages by David Rosenberg, former...
...Bloom sees J as a single individual who wrote after Solomon's reign 29 centuries ago but displays a modernistic skepticism and worldliness. Though he maintains that J's "power as a writer made Judaism, Christianity and Islam possible," Bloom believes she harbored neither love nor awe of God. He conceives of her as more blasphemous than Salman Rushdie in portraying the Deity as impish and arbitrary...
...Bloom admits that a feminine J is supposition. Among his arguments: Genesis contains the only known account from the ancient Middle East of the creation of woman -- six times as long as the story of Adam's advent from a "mud pie." Furthermore, the women of the Pentateuch (Eve, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Tamar, Zipporah) are strong; none of the men (Abraham, Jacob, Moses) are particularly good looking. Circumstantial evidence, but in an era of enhanced interest in feminist creativity, it is not very hypothetical to assume that Bloom's work will draw a wide and interested audience...