/lit/ - Literature

>>21273234
>mogs the human race
>mogs the entirety of /lit/cels combined
Nothing personal, /lit/.

>>21243355
You become Harold Bloom (unread version).

>>21243649
>um, loike, yew guise dun even know, loike, eesten mistism is loike sew advanced en loike ummm yea
>jerks off to Whitman
>contracts HIV

There once was a man named Harold Bloom. A case could be made that he had to of read Marx for him to criticize the "fake Marxists" of academia who are mixtures of Foucault and others.

>>19382898
The funny thing is if you actually thought them to be literature, you wouldn't need to waste your time trying to convince others of it, you'd just be happy to read them and find other believes. But your insecurity brings you here. The fact that you need to try and win over others to your view shows that you don't truly believe it yourself to begin with.

The king of critics, the master librarian, btfoer of trannies and femoids, Mr. Harold Bloom

Carry my legacy, /lit/

>>13596431
as long as no one invites YouKnowWho

>I continue to prefer The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings but acknowledge that I represent only a minority of current readers. Tolkien’s epic fantasy is moralistic, and its neobiblical style is pretentious and inflated. Perhaps because it began as a fairy tale for children, The Hobbit is rather more refreshing.
>Whether even The Hobbit is other than a period piece is questionable. Read it side by side with John Crowley’s Little, Big and you will find The Hobbit vanishing away! The same fate attends Tolkien’s epic when juxtaposed with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. My own canonical prophecy, founded on a long lifetime of literary study, has to be melancholy. Like his imitator, the Harry Potter saga, Tolkien will not be read a generation or two hence.
>Attempt to reread Rider Haggard’s She or King Solomon’s Mines. Like Tolkien’s books, they are more vivid as movies and fade on the page. Haggard is Tolkien’s authentic precursor; his Allan Quartermain is a palpable model for Bilbo Baggins. Contributors to this guide do damage to The Hobbit when they invoke Lewis Carroll’s Alice books or Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Comparisons to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Treasure Island are equally destructive to Tolkien.
>For more than a half century, I have been chided as provocative and controversial merely because I go on insisting that, without aesthetic and cognitive standards, imaginative literature will perish, and something in us also will wane. Thinking depends on memory. Fashion passes, and the libraries are replete with forgotten bestsellers. The function of criticism, particularly in the digital age, is to teach us to prefer more difficult pleasures than those so easy that they weaken our minds.

based & redpilled

>>9792458
As I read, I noticed that every time bugs went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the rabbit should go 'easy on the carrots'. I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase received a (You). I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous.

>>9792457
As I read, I noticed that every time bugs went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the rabbit should go 'easy on the carrots'. I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase received a (You). I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous.

>>9545691
TALENT

>Poe's stories, despite their permanent, world-wide popularity, are atrociously written (as are his poems) and benefit by translation, even into English.

How could one man be so wrong? You memed me, didn't you guys?

>I used to read 1000 pages in one hour

Who does this man think he's fooling?

>>8804932
God. Stephen King really is Cervantes compared to DFW

When will this fat sack of shit drop dead?

is he a hack?

So I know this isn't the "end-all" Western Canon list, and that Bloom himself would later go on to disavow it, but how does the list stand for you personally? What books/authors do you feel are really missing? Ones you feel just don't belong there?

the complete list:
http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

Why the fuck does he like reading so much?

He talks about it like reading great writers is the most awe-inspiring experience in life, but I don't really get that at all. When I read Shakespeare or Don Quixote, I'm just like, "Yeah this is prety cool" but I don't see why he thinks they're so amazing. He doesn't explain himself in interviews very well. Does he talk about this better in his books?

>>8431298
>"Our most distinguished living writer of narrative fiction—I don’t think you would quite call him a novelist—is David Foster Wallace"
>~ Harold Bloom

>>8408662

Harold Bloom. He is our guide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvmtbzzNtbQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9ieF7LVbyI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHGu11GL9qw

>>8396884

1. Pick something you genuinely (genuinely) want to read. Don't try to give a shit about c/lit/s calling you a pleb if you read genre shit or pop-nonfiction books.
2. Read somewhere quiet and away from technology. Somewhere like a peaceful park or a library. Don't bring your cellphone.
3. Stop using the internet and playing video games so much. It's been scientifically proven that it warps your brain and worsens your attention span. If you're still young, your brain is maleable and there can still be hope.
4. Be patient and don't give up after you read one boring book. Books and literature have a huge variety of styles and subjects.
5. Watch or read a couple interviews of Harold Bloom. His love for literature is genuinely inspiring. Keep a picture of him close by and contemplate it regularly for additional support.

He likes Joyce, Gaddis, Gass, Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon, but for some reason he hates DFW. Why is that?

Based Bloom:

>>“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.”