/lit/ - Literature

His name is Harold Bloom.

Doesn't seem to get mentioned around here.

Probably too deep for y'all anxious minds.

Let's have a thread about Harold "Brontosaurus" Bloom. What does /lit/ think?

Is the anxiety of influence a good way of interpreting text or perhaps it's too competitive?

He claims to be against theory yet his concept of influence is, I'd argue, wholly Freudian.
Is he too narrow-minded when it comes to other ways of reading and his own views on what deserves to be read? Do we even need a canon anymore? Perhaps his concept of originality is too founded on a perspective of a Professor who needs to churn out "original" publications and theses?

Do we have any right to criticize a man who's read every book, and every book about any book, at least 50 times? When was the last time you read at a speed of 17 pages a minute? Is Bloom far too deep for Academia too handle? How many tears will you shed when this martyr for literature dies?

Discuss.

So /lit/, what do you think of Bloom's theory that Shakespeare based Hamlet off Mark's Jesus and King Lear off Yahweh?

Harold Bloom has got everything figured out. He is a martyr of the canon and what used to be considered the humanities, but which is now mainly cultural herp and derp for mediocre minds.

You can try to disagree with him but the man has read almost everything, twice and knows his fucking shit. Not only has he read every book, but he's read every single book about any book.

Literature should primarily be understood as an agon with a (Freudian, if you will) literary father-figure, vying for supremacy and immortality.

All haters are necessarily anxious and jelly.