ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which Harold Bloom deals with rhetoric and rhetorical analysis. It then focuses on three different aspects of this engagement: the intersection with traditional rhetoric; the argument with and assimilation of Paul de Man's theory of figuration; the extension of trope to include defence, and hence the engagement with Freud's conceptual rhetoric. Bloom's first book, seen as an attempt to formulate a rhetorical description of Shelley's poetry which was both distanced from the prevailing norms of Shelley criticism while at the same time adequate to the poetry. The term Bloom uses in this first book is 'mythopoeia', which he understands at the very opening of his career in writing in specifically rhetorical terms. This inter-connectedness of two differing descriptions of the tropological field will be examined.
