/lit/ - Literature

This board is hopeless.

Why is he so miserable in every pic?

Do you agree with Harold Bloom that Fyodor Dostoyevsky, judged strictly in terms of aesthetic merit, is not one of the 26 greatest writers in the history of western civilization? (Dostoyevsky wasn’t one of the names in Bloom’s The Western Canon.)

If you don't read for four hours a day, then write for one hour a day, then you will never make it. No one can write well if they don't read.

What's /lit/'s opinion on this list?
http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtbloom.html
I'm particularly interested in the opinion of Germans and Frenchmen about the texts selected as representing the best of their region's output
I haven't read his book on the Western Canon but does he consider the texts he lists as worthy of being reading or is it more the books which he considers as being significant in the Western Canon?
There are a lot of 18th and 19th century novels on the list which aren't read these days which I'm intrigued by

>I guess I have several favorites. MACBETH is my favorite among the
tragedies; it upsets me the most-I find it really very terrifying.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE is the most fascinating and enigmatic of all the
plays. For sheer pleasure? The comedies AS YOU LIKE IT and TWELFTH
NIGHT-so upsetting and zany. I have a special passion for LOVE'S LABORS
LOST, and of course, as I say in the book, if I had to choose one play
by Shakespeare, it would be the two parts of HENRY IV, taken as one
play. I identity with Falstaff, so that big double play has to be my
favorite.

>"Benito" Bush is the decline and fall of the American Empire all of himselve
>Bush is our Caligula, our Nero

Was this man retarded?

Even if you agree with him in principle, you have to admit he was biased towards English-speaking writers.

What is a good History of Literature book?

Something that provides an overview of major literary periods and major figures in them?

This guy recommends memorizing poetry. Where's a good place to start?

which critics are worth actually paying attention to? Do you have any favourite pieces by any of them?

>didnt include buddenbrooks
why should i pay attention to him?

What does /lit/ think of Harold Bloom?

I'll start

>>16482338
>it's a meme for pseud NPC midwits bro
>tfw Bloom self-identified as a gnostic

kek fucking destroyed

What judgements of his do you disagree with? I cannot abide by his designating CS Lewis the “intellectual sage of George W. Bush’s America”

>But I fear something more insidious than traditional stupidity turns mediocrities like Knausgård into modern Prousts. I believe these encomia stem from a sense of guilt and overcompensation. A few years ago people learned with shock that Americans don’t translate a lot; this served as a call to arms to many small publishers to fill the gap, and so a new era of foreign fiction translation started with remarkable missionary zeal; one entity even named itself Three Percent, that being the percentage of foreign books translated in America. It didn’t help that Horace Engdahl, of the Royal Swedish Academy, around the same time accused American literature of being too insular. I think many fiction writers, editors and reviewers are afraid of looking too insular, too provincial and so they praise indiscriminately whatever reaches their shores. Afraid of offending, they automatically turn everything with a whiff of world literature into a modern masterpiece.
>—Harold Bloom, The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

He also includes Ferrante, Houellebecq, Bolano, and Modiano as overrated "world lit" mediocrities. Is he right?

Which came first: the chicken or the egg?
In other words, did Harold Bloom's commitment to Freudian psychoanalysis, and its resonance in his theory of anxiety of influence, predate his reading of Hamlet, which features the singular, contradictory individual, who takes his bearings via the unnatural death of his father? Or, did Bloom, the devout psychologist of Shakespeare, commit to Freudianism as a result of his reading of Hamlet?

tl;dr Freud or Shakespeare: why does Bloom read the way he does?

If he understood so much, why didn't he write masterpieces himself?