Mind, brain and narrative

Complementing Allen by making the Freudian subtext explicit, Julian Wolfreys then investigates intriguing questions of belatedness and haunting, exploring the vital but often misunderstood influence of Freud on The Anxiety of Influence in particular. Last but not least, Arthur Bradley situates Bloom’s work in relation to the so-called ‘Yale school’ of literary theory and thereby shows how critical methods become institutionalized in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. This essay is also a defence of reading in its very impossibility (277–78) and a fitting conclusion to the book as a whole.