Title: Harold Bloom’s Late Appreciative Criticism and Aesthetic Return

Abstract: Harold Bloom was a core member of the Yale School of deconstruction in the United States, and his theory of the anxiety of influence is extremely insightful. Since the 1990s, Western modern literary criticism has been limited by politicization, historicization and gendered orientation. Therefore, Bloom returns to literary aesthetics in his later years. He points out the phenomenon of aesthetic decay in literary studies. He insists on reconstructing the pedigree of Western classics with aesthetics as the core and advocates appreciative criticism. Appreciative criticism takes reading, rereading, describing, evaluating and appreciating as the basic elements. It insists on mechanical printing as the aesthetic medium and takes classical literature as the aesthetic object. It pursues the sublime aesthetic style and inherits the Western Romanticism and Aestheticism in poetic tradition.Bloom advocates restoring the personality of the critical subjectivity and returning to the literary noumenon. Bloom’s late appreciative criticism provides useful enlightenment to the imbalance between theoretical construction and aesthetic insistence in current literary studies.

Keywords: Harold Bloom, appreciative criticism, aesthetic return, literary noumenon

Author: Xinggang Shen, Assistant, Organization Department, Chongqing Chemical Industry Vocational College, Chongqing, China.