| Harold Bloom's critical passages in The Book of J claim that Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers were in no way a product of oral tradition but of a highly literate female court author called "J". This antagonism towards oral scholarship expressed through the fictional author J is the culmination of the development of his theory of reading, beginning from his feud with New Criticism and developed throughout his career, most famously in The Anxiety of Influence. For Bloom, what scholar of orality Walter Ong terms our culture's "secondary orality" presents a threat to the importance he places on reading, which he attempts to protect throughout The Book of J. When faced with the positions of these two 20th century scholars a dichotomy is revealed between the latter, who sees new potential in the study of literature revealed via the study of orality, and the latter, who sees troubling implications in its reemergence in our time. |
