/lit/ - Literature

>>22407644
services.the discomfort 'political correctness gone mad' makes you feel is not even one billionth of the humilliation queer people or people of color go through every instant of their existence in a cisheteropatriarchal white supremacist society. Yes i am a SJW, i am an antifascist, a feminist killjoy and the postmodern neomarxist jordan peterson warned you about, I would burn every last page of the western cannon if it meant ending racism and sexism, disinformation and white privilege and transphobia and whorephobia. and no this is not radical, but the least that should be expected of a decent empathetic human being

>>22407653
2/10 b8

>>22407653

>>22407644
It's ironic, because Bloom himself was part of a very similar school. The school of ressentiment.

>>22407722
what

>>22407644
>>22407653
>>22407722
Bloom really respected many minority authors, he talks about them in the one book of his I've read (The American Religion), mentioning some black female authors from the late 20th century (book is from the 1990s) in the context of his criticism of the "school of resentment." Bloom is nowhere comparable to /lit/ chuds. He's actually very very willing to give minority literature a chance. His problem is that some of that work is just not good. Some of it is great, it CAN be as great as anything, but merely filling in the slots in the canon with minority representation without quality checks isn't the way to go. That's all he was pointing out. That, and the attempts to remove parts of the western canon because those parts have their moral imperfections. Frankly I think he's got a point, but Bloom was much better than the /lit/ chuds who just want to co-opt him into their shitty manichean culture wars. He championed lesser known figures that nobody else took seriously, again to mention from The American Religion, the best example is his immense praise for Joseph Smith. He ranks him up there with Emerson, Whitman, and William James as one of the most creative genius spirits of American history. It proves Bloom was always an inclusivist, but the argument has to be made on genuine aesthetic or artistic critical basis for adding someone. You can't just do it for sake of representation alone, and you're not licensed to take other people out as some kind of payback for their moral imperfections. Anywya, a proper leftist analysis of the current state of "the left" itself (from left-libs to demsocs and socdems and left-anarchists and Marxists of all stripes, Trostskyists, MLs, Maoists, LeftComs, etc) will show that they're all endorsing essentialist presuppositions of the old classical liberal mindset, as well as the logic of capitalism, and that's sad, which is why the best leftists now are leftists+ or post-leftists so to speak, they're more left than the left because the current left is too on the right together with the liberals and conservatives. Point being, you shouldn't do this "representational inclusivity" crap except, to use a phrase from better leftists, for strategic essentialist reasons. But most of these lesser leftists do it for naively essentialist reasons, with manichean inversion, aka they are just their enemies (white cis male heteronormative oppressors) but inverted, so they can come on top as the revenge-oppressors. It's fundamentally essentialist, it's fundamentally born of capitalist logic too. And if you're a good leftist, you'd know Marx's point about how the base determines the superstructure was meant to have this effect, modern leftism is really just another front of the capitalist superorganism that it uses to control individuals and prevent them from genuinely eliminating it, its other two fronts being conservatism and liberalism.

>>22407865
The issue is not le minorities. It's prioritizing identify politics bullshit over aesthetic achievement. Bloom like a few Toni Morrison works but disliked the mediocre Marxist ones.

>>22407644
And this is why this website is either a Koch bros/CIA psyop.

He admits in his English verse book all the poets he resents. He just doesn’t pretend they weren’t good at some point in their lives, usually their least “problematic” point.

>>22407873
> The issue is not le minorities.
Jew moment

>>22407901
There have been good books written by them. It would be dishonest to claim otherwise.

>>22407722
Sounds like you are part of the school of ressentitiment

>>22407722
He was very happy to bring up an author's antisemitism.

>>22407644
>How does Harold Bloom’s argument against, what he calls, the “school of resentment” hold up in literary studies?
It holds up extraordinarily well, and it ought to be applied to every other facet of the humanities. The subpar ought not be shilled for simply because the status of their genitals, their skin color, or their political opinions are currently en vogue.

>>22407644
Reading lists based on quotas are dogshit, however we have to note that what r*ghtoids are concerned about is reading books by straight white men, not good books regardless of personal characteristics.

>>22408170
/pol/tards are the other side of the resentment coin. They dislike books by non-whites, leftists and homosexuals regardless of literary quality.

>>22408179
When it comes to the canon writers they just try to reframe them to make them compatible with the alt-right. Like how Plato is often known only for a brief homophobic excerpt in Laws Book III here.

>>22407653
>whorephobia
replace it with something like "contempt of women making their living via sexwork" or something.
>yes i am a SJW
should be dropped
7/10, has some serious potential

I've posted about this recently but I believe there is a deeper problem than culture war stuff going in literary discussion. Even in most of the small bit of supposedly on topic discussion here where at least actual books are talked about. Imo the real problem has to do with people failing to see literature as an art form with aesthetic intent. This is understandable since not all books do have purely aesthetic intentions, but it becomes a problem when all the complexity, particularity, craftsmanship, and the actual experience of a piece is reduced to ideology and allegory. Art is so much more than a fancy convoluted way of conveying philosophy, and a purely philosophical assessment of a work is bound to be artistically shallow.

Having said all that, the current academic mindset definitely has even less to do with artistic concerns than the reader who goes into a book with messages, social commentary or "the human condition" or whatever in mind. Not only are the selection of the texts tokenistic (in a shamelessly racist way in my experience) but the reading of them and the reading of the reading of them (works of critical theorists that call themselves literary critics) is completely irrelevant to art as an entity distinct from propaganda.

Otherwise I don't care about THE canon, the culture wars, Harold Bloom, western values etc

I've posted about this recently but I believe there is a deeper problem than culture war stuff going in literary discussion. Even in most of the small bit of supposedly on topic discussion here where at least actual books are talked about. Imo the real problem has to do with people failing to see literature as an art form with aesthetic intent. This is understandable since not all books do have purely aesthetic intentions, but it becomes a problem when all the complexity, particularity, craftsmanship, and the actual experience of a piece is reduced to ideology and allegory. Art is so much more than a fancy convoluted way of conveying philosophy, and a purely philosophical assessment of a work is bound to be artistically shallow.

Having said all that, the current academic mindset definitely has even less to do with artistic concerns than the reader who goes into a book with messages, social commentary or "the human condition" or whatever in mind. Not only are the selection of the texts tokenistic (in a shamelessly racist way in my experience) but the reading of them and the reading of the reading of them (works of critical theorists that call themselves literary critics) is completely irrelevant to art as an entity distinct from propaganda.

Otherwise I don't care about THE canon, the culture wars, Harold Bloom, western values etc

>>22408420
I agree with you. I don't know if there has ever been or ever will be a place where the "art" of literature (or other art forms) is primarily what is discussed. It's just far more satisfying (I conclude from observation) for humans to create the same discussions about the same pet peeves and hobby horses over and over again. The presumed content is just a vehicle for it. I think that talking about the art of it (whatever it is you and/or I mean by that), would be incredibly solipsistic the same way that recounting our dreams and impressions of our dreams would be. Maybe nobody really gives a fuck about it under any circumstances, so it's reserved for people who give a great amount of fucks about us in general, like close loved ones. Would at least explain why it seems impossible to find anyone to talk about art with, even amongst "art" communities.

>>22407653
This is what the average German sounds like these days.

>>22407653
Bait

>>22407717
Samefag

>>22407873
>The issue is not le minorities. It's prioritizing identify politics bullshit over aesthetic achievement.
Yup but that's what I already said

>>22409333
>I don't know if there has ever been or ever will be a place where the "art" of literature (or other art forms) is primarily what is discussed.
In conservatories they teach music theory and history. Same with most of the fine arts from what I heard from my friends there.
>Maybe nobody really gives a fuck about it under any circumstances
People do. If we separated the ideological discussions from the artistic ones the people who care wouldn't have to go through a sea of irrelevance. In practice, in the case of /lit/, it would mean a separate religion/philosophy board (/his/ isn't working). In the case of academia, it would mean everything cultural being swept to cultural studies where it belongs.

I've had this idea for a while now of something like a mix of goodreads and genius.com where people could talk about and share their annotations of a book. There are author specific forums such as thenabokovian.org where there is in depth discussion to be found but its not really that accessible.