/lit/ - Literature

STICKY THIS YOU FUCKING FAGGOTS

>>12734079
Lily, please

In keeping with our general pretentiousness and comparative seriousness, our youtuber guy is actually a genius and a scholar.

Is he basically a Freudian or what?

People who haven't read him need not reply.

Does anybody here have lessons or had lessons in the past with Harold Bloom?

If yes, is he kind enough to spare a moment of his time to read excerpts from literature made by young new authors (something like 20-30 pages)?

I don’t even write in English, but I have translated some of my work and I would like to mail it to him, to see what he would say about it. I have published two books, but not one critic in my native country - from any newspaper, blog or magazine - has bothered reading them. I am not very good in promoting myself, and my style of writing is not that popular nowadays. It is as if the books didn’t exist at all.

I found out recently that critics generally just read what the Publishing houses send them, and in my case the access to major critics was simply not possible (I being from a third world country and launching the books by a small publisher).

I strongly believe, however, that Bloom would like my material. If not, then at least I know that someone who actually loves literature and is not afraid to speak his mind has criticized the faults in my efforts with impartiality and with a mind that is a huge wool-ball composed of thousands of speeches, endless phrases, verses and echoes uttered by great authors from all ages and places.

So, if someone here actually knows Bloom: is there a chance of him reading my material if I send to the correct address?

>Read
>Reread
>Describe
>Evaluate
>Appreciate
What else needs to be done to fully/best critic a piece of literature?

There is a literature canon. We know about it and some of us have read works that are listed in it. I think it's a fair assessment that we know less about literature than we do about memes. Can this board create a meme canon? Only the most highly developed, internally consistent, transcendent, and insightful memes need be included.

Are lists of great books mostly a Western phenomenon? As in, would you find something similar to Bloom's canon in Japanese or Fadiman's in Arabic?

>>4393258
Infinite Jest sucks. That's the problem. I've read it twice and it sucks, because Wallace had no idea what he was doing. He doesn't have a single theme he really really pays attention to, he just makes all his themes even more banal than they already are by spending so much time wanking over the intricacies tennis and drugs to show how smart he is. It's meaningless, it needs a damn editor, and it's also pretentious and cruel. Hundreds of pages could've been removed and it would've been a far better book.

I used to love Infinite Jest until I started reading more books. Shitty prose, shitty themes, shitty editing, and it's also a complete failure to DFW's own fantasy of New Sincerity. DFW would've been an edgy YA writer and this would've been an edgy YA book if his mum didn't instill such a huge and nerdy vocabulary into his poor, childish brain.

Why does Harold Bloom put Freud on his list of 26 writers essential to the western canon, but doesn't but any of his works on the actual list itself?

>>3702232
Yeah I'm thinking of picking up the Norton anthology. It looks to have a nice bibliography, too.

I'd still like to have a nice structured reading list if it exists, though.

>>3526633
But there is still the burden of Tolkien’s style: stiff, false archaic,
overwrought, and finally a real hindrance in Volume III, The Return of the
King, which I have had trouble rereading. At seventy-seven, I may just be too
old, but here is The Return of the King, opened pretty much at random:
At the doors of the Houses many were already gathered to see
Aragorn, and they followed after him; and when at last he had
supped, men came and prayed that he would heal their kinsmen
or their friends whose lives were in peril through hurt or wound,
or who lay under the Black Shadow. And Aragorn arose and went
out, and he sent for the sons of Elrond, and together they labored
far into the night. And word went through the city: ‘The King is
come again indeed.’ And they named him Elfstone, because of the
green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold
at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own
people.
I am not able to understand how a skilled and mature reader can absorb
about fifteen hundred pages of this quaint stuff. Why “hurt or wound”; are they
not the same? What justifies the heavy King James Bible influence upon this
style? Sometimes, reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon.
Tolkien met a need, particularly in the early days of the counterculture in
the later 1960s. Whether he is an author for the duration of the twenty-first
century seems to me open to some doubt.s

"He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.”

Harold Bloom on George R. R. Fartin

"People are trapped in the age of what you might call the triple screen: the motion-picture screen—and this is in ascending order of evil in terms of what it does to their minds throughout the world—the television screen, and finally the computer screen, which is the real villain."

Hey, this is a narrative essay I wrote. It's a page long, double spaced I think. I'm looking for some feedback. The language is supposed to be very simple, any help with that would be especially great.

https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=14AYWSReAcC4albB2fwbvHKWss8t5MGXbCbj38QnDvIM&hl=en&
authkey=CLuK0fwL

Thanks.