/lit/ - Literature

>>18628406
atheists can't into fantasy. it always has been and always will be the territory of catholichads.

>>17279144
>He was a shut-in Autist

He was a university professor with a large family and a wide circle of friends and literary/academic acquaintances who was known to love to drink with his friends and share prose and poetry together in the pub or in his study at Oxford. So not exactly hikkikomori!

Be a real /lit/ chad and smoke a pipe instead

>>16817721

>>16230330
based

>weird fiction
that's gonna be a yikes from me

>>9496242
>You guys told me Harold Bloom was the good guy. He spoke of the evils of Harry Potter and I aligned myself with him.
You cannot judge a critic by the degree to which their assessments agree with yours. It's the quality of their method that matters.

I'm sure most of us are familiar with Bloom's words on Harry Potter, especially this memetic passage:
> As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous.
In a thread where this came up, an anon did a quick check of the e-text, and found that "stretched his legs" came up exactly once, in the first chapter. How could an experienced critic make such an error? The obvious answer, is that Bloom was trawling for a criticism, found one, blew it up beyond proportion, and then set it on the page in what he thought would be an amusing and condescending anecdote.

Harry Potter is no masterpiece, but that does not allow Bloom to somehow suspend critical integrity in treating that work. The same thing happens in this review of Tolkien. He makes an unfavorable comparison ("reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon") which he never expands on. He makes a vague and unsupported appeal to popular opinion (Tolkien's verse... is generally accepted to be even worse); anyone who has read Orwell will notice that sneaky passive voice. His comment on Tolkien's prose being "unbearably archaic" betrays (or purposefully conceals) his own ignorance. Anyone who has read Beowulf even once will realize that Tolkien's paratactic style comes from Old English verse.

I am sure there is plenty in Tolkien's works of which one could be negatively critical, but this hardly even counts as criticism. As with these examples >>9497973, it is little more than a collection of pithy, empty, and dismissive statements. It is the work of an egoist who does not even bother to waste his time attempting to read a book critically. And they must be read critically! Even the Harry Potters of the world demand this, for if criticism is not applied equally and fairly to all literary works, what is the point? Anything else is an exercise in professional vanity and virtue-signalling. That this attitude can be found in a long-honored figure as Professor Bloom goes to show the degeneration of criticism in our culture.

>>9203859
>Lord of the Rings
>reactionary
Are you retarded?