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DISCUSSED: Basements as Dungeons, Middle-earth, War Games, Moral Clarity, Vin Diesel, Biological Determinism, Death by Misadventure, Freaks Geeks, Tom Hanks, Castration Anxiety, Satanism,…

Opinion Top row from left: Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, George Washington Carver and Betty Friedan. Bottom row from left: Charles R. Drew, Germaine Greer, John Maynard Keynes and Marshall…

For more than 50 years Harold Bloom’s name has been synonymous with the study of literature, from his groundbreaking book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and its sequel A Map of Misreading (1975), to definitive studies on Shelley (Shelley’s Mythmaking, 1959), William Butler Yeats (Yeats, 1970), and Wallace Stevens (Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, 1977) among others.

For this bodiless replicator itself, Richard Dawkins proposed a name. He called it the meme, and it became his most memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytizing against religiosity. “Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation,” he wrote. They compete with one another for limited resources: brain time or bandwidth. They compete most of all for attention.

booksReading between the lines.By Sudhir VenkateshUpdated Monday, April 18, 2011, at 6:58 AM ET