/lit/ - Literature

who cares. his books suck

social justice strikes again

"It's not about stopping people from reading books written by people of color/women; it's about ethics in aesthetic selection!"

i read the reddit comments. i don't know what i was expecting

lots of
>master student here . . . whyte male driven cannon
>phd here . . . dismisses marxism . . . racist
>masters student here, ive never seen him cited in my retarded who cares academic papers lel that means hes bad! why am i being down voted?(why do people on reddit say this holy fuck i wish i could kill them)
>lit studies here why do the . . . white hetero normative


why is it always like this.

>>5750318
The idea that you can analyze literature independently of politics is itself a political position.

>>5750354
Does that actually address the top comment, though? Admittedly there's a lot of liberal inclusionist bullshit going on.

>>5750363
I used to have a religitard friend that said atheism was a religion. He's like you a lot.

>>5750363
why.

how the fuck is that a political position at all?

abstaining from political analysis might coincidentally favor one position over another politically but that is not a political position.

do you know what the fuck the word position means?

>>5750372
There it is in all it's glory - /lit/

>>5750372
>>5750363
I think what's more important here is that, while >>5750363 may be correct, a literary critic has no political obligations for his or her work

>>5750378

>>5750378
pure ideology my friend ;^)

>>5750397

I don't know if I hate you or love you.

>>5750380
literally how the fuck is >>5750363
correct.

If you are by no intention laying out a political argument then it is not truly a political position you are taking.

For example.
>person A thinks the world is 5k years old.
>political position X holds that the earth is 5k years old and that god exists and that all laws should be in accordance with the bible.

Now, person A is actually an atheist. he believe in a secular law and give ZERO fucks about political position X

Now suppose that person A writes a book about how the earth is 5k years old.

now suppose a "literary critic" comes along and mistakes his thesis for a political position which it never was intended o be.
>sir if you are defending the idea that the earth is 5k years old then how do you justify all the fucked up shit in the bible and biblical law that we should supposedly believe because of the earth being 5k years old

the critic, in assuming a political position in a senario where no political position was ever taken, has SWAPPED TERMS and created an argument and meaning out of thin air just my his own hubris.
A POSITION, is an argument that has been set out in a specific way for a specific and intended purpose. Any other positions it SEEMS to support are unrelated and not correctly attributed to that argument.

I gain pleasure from how heated people who seem to be basically in agreement are getting there.

>Maybe my answer comes off to you as more condescending than absolutely necessary, but it was perfectly serious and intended to clearly explain my position to anyone reading, whereas you're just being an asshole.

I wish I was this self-serious.

>>5750413
What actual critical position is your ridiculous strawman supposed to correspond to?

>>5750413
It's amazing that someone can type so much and say so little.

Bloom has great taste in literature but he seems to mostly love picking fights with people who don't actually disagree with him in the way he thinks they do.

>>5750318
>I can understand, then, that Bloom is disheartened by such recent manifestations of what he calls the “Culture of Resentment.” But I am not sure it is enough to respond to that culture by citing large chunks of Emerson and Whitman or by invoking Shakespeare as our tutelary spirit. To begin with, I would argue, Bloom is himself partly responsible for the shift from aesthetic (or formalist) criticism to the “cultural” model he denounces. For despite his current endorsement of the aesthetic position, Bloom’s own perspective, at least from The Anxiety of Influence (1973) on down, has been much more thematic than formal or structural or linguistic; indeed, its central thrust has been primarily Freudian. Why Freud and not Marx? Why the vocabulary of clinamen and tessera and apophrades rather than, say, the Russian Formalist vocabulary of faktura and “making it strange” or the Bakhtinian vocabulary of dialogism and heteroglossia? And why the admission of Wordsworthian and Emersonian poets into the pantheon at the expense of poets of rival persuasions, beginning with Eliot, who, like it or not, has had such a seminal influence on Bloom’s own favorite “spent seer,” John Ashbery?

>I would argue that the insistence on the Romantic paradigm as _the_ paradigm has made Bloom curiously impervious to some of the most exciting poetry now being written. And that even in the case of his favorite modernist poet, Wallace Stevens, his refusal to deal with matters of sound, rhythm, and syntax in Stevens’s “poems of our climate,” has not exactly helped to pave the way for an aesthetic criticism. Indeed, the psychology of tropes that is central to Bloom’s readings has a way of bringing us back to thematic motifs outside the materiality of the poetic language itself. Why is Ashbery’s Three Poems written in prose, not verse? One would never know, reading Bloom on Ashbery. Such “technical” details are evidently judged to be irrelevant.

>>5750458
>Accordingly, his own contemporary canon, as instanced by his choices in The Best of the Best, strikes me as curiously restricted. The Romantic line, however attenuated that line has become in the poetry of, say, Irving Feldman or Jonathan Aaron, is preferred to the countercurrents represented by Robert Creeley or Michael Palmer (each included in five of the ten annual anthologies), and by any number of poets from Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein to Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian, Clark Coolidge and Rosmarie Waldrop, who are currently being read and studied in countries as diverse as Brazil and China, Austria and Australia.

>My own hunch is that Bloom is perfectly aware of the limitations of his chosen texts. Again and again in his Introduction, he comes back to the names of his beloved dead: Emerson and Whitman, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. Ashbery and A. R. Ammons excepted, he can’t seem to work up enormous enthusiasm about the living. Indeed, it is as if his distaste for contemporary academic life has undermined his willingness to move outside the ivied walls or outside the sanctuaries of the mainstream presses to look for poetic material. “It is ironical,” he writes, “that, in this bad time, American poetry is of a higher quality than our criticism or teaching of poetry.” But why is it ironical that poetry should be of a higher quality than the teaching and criticism of poetry? And when has it ever been different?

>>5750421
How the fuck is that a strawman?

He said not taking a political position is taking a political position i answered exactly that question.


The only possible way what i said could be a strawman is if nobody in this thread knew what the fuck the word "position" meant.

but to be entirely honest im starting to think thats the case.

do you know what the fuck strawman means?


why are you asking for a actual critical position? im showing a proof of concept. Its clear that you can detach an argument from a political position that supposedly corresponds to, and that wrongfully attributing the political position otherwise is asinine.

>>5750434
see: everything you have ever said in your life

>>5750441
I'd like to see an example of this. I think he has a much better understanding of the people who disagree with him than you do

>>5750458
Bloom never claimed to be a formalist

>>5750463
You give an entirely made up example where one entirely made up person accuses thinks that when another entirely made up person believes in a young earth, it entails an agreement with the entire bible. I don't see at all how that maps on to, say, the criticism of Bloom in the top post on the Reddit thread.

>>5750458
>Why is Ashbery’s Three Poems written in prose, not verse? One would never know, reading Bloom on Ashbery. Such “technical” details are evidently judged to be irrelevant.


lel, it is irrelevant.

>>5750461
>Ashbery and A. R. Ammons excepted, he can’t seem to work up enormous enthusiasm about the living.
It's because he's fucking old. What do you expect out of a man with one foot in the grave? Is it really a surprise that, in the twilight years of his life, he prefers to go back to his old favorites, rather than look through the works of the hundreds, thousands of new poets for genuine talent and creativity? I don't think you can blame him.

>>5750490
Did you even read what that was in reply to?

>>5750503
Why do you say that? Particularly if you're trying to give a reading that isolates the aesthetic, form seems like a necessary subject of inquiry, even if one isn't ultimately "a formalist."

>>5750514
Okay, so this is just a free floating claim that has absolutely nothing to do with Bloom, who's clearly staking a political position? Because I was confused.

>>5750318
>taking Harold Bloom seriously
ayy

>>5750318
Read the top comment; it made a perfectly reasonable, intelligent argument. Lose the superiority complex, people; going on 4chan instead of reddit doesn't mean you always know better.

>>5750518
I was a portrait painter for 4 years.
sometimes you use a certain style, sometimes you use another.
But usually the painting would have been good or bad regardless of the style used. the substance of the work and how much love and attention is spent are such colossal forces in the formation of a work of art that arguing over minute stylistic differences is largely "irrelevant".

It might add a certain texture of feeling, so maybe that anon is going too far calling it irrelevant. but its certainly not as important as art critics like to faff on about.

>>5750524
i was responding to a post in this thread concerning the notion that "not taking a political position is a political position"
I was responding to that idea,

sorry if you cant read to good anon

you should also look up what a strawman was if that was you, because its not what you think it is.

>>5750531
Both sites are equally terrible in my opinion. Also I think that guy is being unfair to Bloom and assuming a few things about him but whatever

>>5750544
Literary critics aren't trying to gauge "goodness" or "badness" though, but trying to interpret and understand things in a historical setting. Maybe it isn't that important to the overall aesthetic pleasure the work brings compared to other written works, but it surely should be taken into account if you're trying to place a work historically.

>>5750560
Bloom is an opponent of excessive historicism in criticism as well, actually

>>5750503
Is it irrelevant that Paradise Lost is in blank verse or that the Divine Comedy is in terza rima?

Bloom is shit.

These people are shit and what they defend is shit; every single thing they stand for is shit.

So: why do you care?

>>5750570
Is everything shit?

>>5750555
What things is he assuming? When you cut through the obnoxious snark in the answer, I thought his basic arguments for why Bloom's stance is invalid or at least doesn't address the critiques that he claims to oppose seem pretty airtight.

>>5750560
To continue the paining analogy, its very much the same still.

It might be important to discover why people are doing something at the "birth" of a new style of painting or a new style of writing. But why people make day to day stylistic decisions is mostly what they think will get them the most purchase with the population they are trying to engage with. AKA whats popular, or whats the alternative to whats popular.


I don't think that its entirely irrelevant. Historically it certainly matters. But in the criticism of a single book i don't think it really matters at all

>>5750560
>Literary critics aren't trying to gauge "goodness" or "badness"

You know that's the entire point of literary criticism right? To make a judgment on a work's value. You are correct is saying that some literary critics will favour trying to interpret a particular text in it's relation to history, but not all.

I'd love to hear any modern literary critics comment on the historical setting's relevance of the Iliad; especially considering that historians know very fucking little about the Mycenaean period.

>>5750569
Most likely, yes.

They might have been more or less popular at the time of their release because certain style of writing come in and out of favor, but in terms of the relevancy to the work itself its not important, or rather its importance is so small considering the actually important things that it might as well be mostly ignored.

>>5750506
Marjorie Perloff wrote that in 1996 when Bloom was 66, so Bloom clearly stopped being interested in new poetry a while ago. Perloff herself is only a year younger than Bloom but has never lost her concern with new poetry, although she arguably focuses on the poets who first began publishing in the 70s and 80s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4daQeq6m8w

>>5750506
>genuine
might be the problem.

>>5750618
are you FUCKING kidding me? Paradise Lost's verse form is a massive crypto-political statement about the restoration. ANY close reading of that poem is going to have to say a shitload about how Milton manipulates the blank verse with formal effects. So yeah, it can be "ignored" insofar as you will be talking about it all the damn time when you are actually talking about what was written in that poem

>>5750477
all of this "resentment" stuff. he's arguing against people who find social and power structures important to the understanding of literature but he treats them like a bunch of Stalinists trying to ban Philip Roth.

they probably don't even dislike Philip Roth, they are just interested in the sociology that reifies certain categories of people and authors, etc.

>>5750649

What im trying to say is that if he did not use the verse that way he would have accomplished the same effect another way

>>5750611
Okay, so literary criticism took a wrong turn when it moved from book reviews to trying to understand the content of texts? Geez, try harder.

>>5750675
This is the stupidest thing I've read all day and I've been grading freshman composition papers.

>>5750611
>>5750682
yes correct the only valid criticism is letter grades

>>5750675
lookit, stop posting here and just accomplish the same effect another way, like broadcasting brain beams into the ether. in any event it won't make a difference, right?

>>5750682

Yeah,

It depends what philosophy of art you subscribe to. but for certain views of what constitutes a work of art would imply if someone is not able to view the piece authentically then they are not even really seeing the work.
Im inclined to believe this because people who focus too much on context and "what structures this work was created in" find what they want to see in the work every god damn time

Bloom is one of those perfect litmus tests of whether someone is great or awful. good people find him refreshing and cathartic, whereas people who don't like him are not only insufferable but pretty much the cancer ruining academic culture, and are because they're basically without fail bad people with broken morals and shit/no aesthetic sense

>>5750602
>Bloom's accuses his enemies of wanting to stop people from reading the works he considers canonical
I don't think he ever does this. Rather he considers the fact that there are people studying literature in universities who haven't read such authors as Shakespeare and Cervantes a (perhaps unintentional, and perhaps necessary) result of the political turn in criticism as a discipline

>his argument is really about suppressing his opponent's views.
He doesn't mind other people expressing their views at all. He's edited hundreds of anthologies of criticism several of which contain the exact kind of politically-oriented criticism he dislikes

>To this, Bloom might turn to attack me rather than my questions about how he came up with his categories, and say that I was a relativist interested in demolishing the canon and stopping his grandchildren from reading Shakespeare
I dont' think he would do this.

To the points about aesthetics "isolated from the wider scene of history", Bloom would simply say that the great works of literature transcend their historical context, and remain relevant today for different reasons, what he calls aesthetic

>>5750682
>Okay, so literary criticism took a wrong turn when it moved from book reviews to trying to understand the content of texts?

Your post makes no fucking sense.

How does making a judgement about a book's value exclude trying to understand the content of the text? Seriously, how do you plan on understanding a text without examining the content? Like do you literally think literary critics judge books by their cover?

>>5750665
A number of people dislike Philip Roth for politically-oriented reasons tbh. Think he hates women

>>5750685

I feel sorry for your students.

>>5750697


Fuck you.

if i say fuck you in a poem, or with meter and rhyme, i will find a way to accomplish my artistic goal in the same way.
I could paint you a painting, it would say fuck you.

if you wrote an essay on which medium or style i picked you might discover some small iota of meaning, but it would be dwarfed by the overwhelming intention of the message that was: fuck you.

>>5750699
"View the piece authentically"? You write and think like someone who's had a brain injury.

>>5750727
"tell, don't show." Is this the doctrine of great art?

I like Harold Bloom. I lack him a loat.

Even if you've never met a writer who feels "threatened by the prospect of imaginative death, of being entirely possessed by a precursor," Bloom is not necessarily wrong in his theory. You don't have to be Karl Popper (who believed a thesis has to be falsifiable to be potentially true) to see the problem with Bloom's claim. When "students ask me why great writers cannot start out fresh, without any past at their back," Bloom confides, "I can only tell them that it just does not work that way." As the poet and critic John Hollander once remarked to The New York Times, "Harold is not particularly a good explainer."

Indeed, he's a consummate assumer. Bloom continues to posit art "as a contest for the foremost place," and agon, or conflict, as "a central feature of literary relationships," even though he knows that it is for some artists, and isn't for others. He's still proud to be an "incessant canonizer." He still talks of the "poet-in-a-poet," by which he means "his daemon, his potential immortality as a poet, and so in effect his divinity."

For the critic fond of literary crushes but eager for clear concepts, convincing evidence of links among writers, and philosophical coherence in shaping a canon of greatness, Bloom disappoints. Even those who admire aspects of his work express regrets. Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears, coeditors of Reading, Writing and the Influence of Harold Bloom, concede that their essay collection must cover those "aspects of Bloom—the pedantry, conservatism, hysteria, and silliness—that so many readers have found in his work." Bloom's literary passion comes soaked in so much bile toward those who love literature differently that it seems a kind of personality disorder rather than healthy aesthetic judgment. When he practices the fundamental critical task of interpreting one writer's link to another, we get arbitrary foolishness: that Leopardi's "possession" of Dante and Petrarch is "miraculous" rather than wholly natural, or that Milton suffers a "humbling defeat" at the hands of Hamlet—a character rather than an author.

reminder that literary criticism is one of those fields that has to work at justifying its own existence

>>5750756
Please don't copy stuff without linking the source: http://chronicle.com/article/Harold-Bloom-by-the-Numbers/127211/

i don't give a shit of the guy who included, damn, olesha to his 'canon' and ignored yesenin

>>5750766
That's just your opinion.

>>5750741

The only reason "telling" is considered poor form is because its so easy that anyone could do it.
That does not mean that someone could not choose to tell something and it turn out well.

although i will say that art is the first step. "great art" comes after that, and probably has less to do with style than art itself.

>>5750722
Yes, I tried to pick an author that attracts this sort of criticism. The point is that an analysis of gender roles in Roth's work is potentially great scholarship if it's done well, and even if Roth was a misogynist it wouldn't preclude him being a very talented writer.

Bloom likes to set himself up as the aesthete against the sociologists, but they're not really against each other, they're all part of the bigger picture.

...oh wow. That's such a frustrating thread. Everyone is talking intelligently and has real points to make but they're all so limited in such obvious ways that reading it feels like banging your head against a wall.

Like, I've never been inclined to believe Bloom's "School of Resentment" was a real thing. Everything that gets commonly cited as such, from haute postmodernism to Tumblr SJ, is either a lot more sophisticated or a lot more instinctual than Bloom gives them credit for. But this entire thread is the School of Resentment exactly as Bloom described it, except they all do care about literature I'm pretty sure and have just cut themselves off so completely from so much. The Bloom fans included.

>>5750544
FYI, you don't know what formalism is. start with the Russians.

>>5750560
School of Resentment pls go

I didn't think I would actually be mad, but I am

>>5750794
>School of Resentment pls go
>I didn't think I would actually be mad, but I am

Summed up my feelings exactly.

>Bloom's fanboys will get mad about this

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/20/classics

>>5750715
The responses to specific points seem like valid criticisms, but also ones that don't eat at the main contention: that Bloom's claim that great works transcend their context is basically arbitrary, where attempting to place them in their context doesn't rely on a "because I said so" type claim.

Also with regard to the second point about expressing views, it seems like poor phrasing. He thinks that literary criticism takes a wrong turn when it looks at lesser aesthetic objects, and he wants to steer critics away from those objects and criticism that concerns them. His inconsistency about what permissible criticism is in relation to works he considers canonical seems secondary.

>>5750853
it's these fucking activists. they need to be driven out of the arts altogether. they're pretty much defined by their inability to contribute anything on their own aesthetically so they make up this conspiracy theory that a bunch of rich guys are trying to keep them down. aestheticism isn't trying to shut out women or minorities here (except for the untalented ones, but the same goes for untalented white males)

>>5750794
The only significantly upvoted claim is neither Bloomian nor School of Resentment, though. >>5750715 points out some issues with it, but I don''t see why it's not basically on point. Granted the rest of the thread is temperature raising.

>>5750870
literally who

>>5750870
based Terry

TL;DR: Bloom's argument is insubstantial, unscholarly reactionary bluster that relies on >illogical categories and an unsatisfying, limited view of history to attack invented adversaries with the seeming intent of stopping professors from reading literature written by minorities.

lol reddit

I'm with Bloom because he actually reads. He's always reading. His opponents seem more interested in politics than reading. Do they even like books, I wonder?

For my own tastes, I'd rather listen to a critic who thinks, like I do, that there is such a thing as good writing. I don't like the trend toward 'everyone's a good writer' and being more interested in whether it offers a 'new perspective' or is 'politically engaged.'

>>5750903
>Do they even like books, I wonder?

Of course not. Do feminist 'video game journalists' like games? Some do, but it's by no means a requirement.

>>5750871
>Bloom's claim that great works transcend their context is basically arbitrary
I don't think it's entirely arbitrary. Bloom's working from the idea that these works have lasted hundreds of years and have been highly influential on later literature and culture in general, and so there must be something beyond their historical context that makes them great, as there are any number of works that did not last, to which much the same historical context can be applied. I don't think he eschews the notion of historical (or cultural) context entirely, either; for one, you need to understand the work's language in order to read it, particularly in the case of poetry.

>He thinks that literary criticism takes a wrong turn when it looks at lesser aesthetic objects, and he wants to steer critics away from those objects and criticism that concerns them.
Only inasmuch as it stops people from looking at greater "aesthetic objects." He might be exaggerating the effect that it has (I wouldn't know), but I think it's definitely a stretch to assume that his motivations are racist or misogynist

I honestly feel bad for Bloom. He seems like the last English professor on earth with the same values I have, that what matters is power of insight and imagination and bringing characters alive, and knowing that Shakespeare and Cervantes are actually more worth one's time than Maya Angelou. Sometimes I'm ashamed to have an English degree, considering what these people have done to the enterprise.

>>5750900
I immediately filter out anyone who calls aestheticist sentiments 'reactionary'. congratulations, you're striving (if, fortunately for us, failing) to undermine the rare moments of brilliance in the world. human trash imo. activists are pure waste

>>5750318
bloom a shit anyway
he looks like a sad egg

>>5750870
I like reading Bloom but this is still a really funny review

>>5750918
Thank you. I don't have to post now.

>>5750921
lol, he is one of the few critics who doesn't look like a pinch-faced, resentful twerp

I remember I saw Bloom on Charlie Rose, and I was skeptical of him because I'd heard all these bad things about him, bout how he was a racist and misogynist and looked down on people. But he seemed like a reasonable guy. What clinched it for me was when he said that he was not against minority literature, that one of the best poets in America is a black poet named Jay Wright but that nobody's interested in him because he's too difficult. Wow, I thought, not only does that explode everything people say about him, but that actually makes sense. The school of resentment types arent interested in Jay Wright because he doesnt push the political agenda in words a high schooler can understand like maya angelou and toni morrison do. That's what made me realize Bloom is actually a good guy and just interested in the best works of literature possible, which is what im interested in too and ive been reading him ever since.

>>5750936
He also considers Anne Carson (a woman, and also a difficult poet) one of the best poets in the English language, equal to John Ashbery and Geoffrey Hill

>>5750890
That's true. melmotte is based. But what bugs me is that the actual discussion is limited, not that people like the wrong things. To the extent that the School of Resentment has made any advances, it's been entirely by exploiting how hard it is to actually talk about literature, and coming up with easy ways around this. I'd personally not even call it the School of Resentment, which mostly reflects Bloom's shallow butthurt about SJWs, so much as the School of Copout or School of Chickenshit. The MOST that "school" can say for itself is that it's fairly progressive, but since the powerful vested interests involved in anything in our society aren't actually pushing for more equality, it's just digging its own grave while it waits for some even more reductive, reactionary school to come along.

Also Bloom put his philosophy in words I understood immediately. He said if you bought a table or a chair would it matter the race or the gender of the person who made it. You just want it to serve its purpose. This is like literature. You want your literature to be beautifully written and alive and provide profound insight into life. If it doesnt do that, why bother? Well, the school of resentment types think that its more important to be politically correct than beautiful, which I dont think is right. They would have us read dead-on-the-page-prose books that peddle the politics they want than works of literature like Shakespeare that are beyond politics because Shakespeare is about PEOPLE, and people precede politics, the nature of who we are as a species gives us every political idea we have and every argument we have. And good literature is about people.

>>5750649
>Paradise Lost's verse form is a massive crypto-political statement about the restoration.

Please never write about literature again.

>>5750936
>>5750948
it looks like he simply has a thing for 'difficult' poets, arbitrary claim them to be 'one of the best', and also doesn't forget to have blacks&women among his favorite difficult poets either

boring

not objective

into the trash bin his opinion goes

>>5750972
lmao

>>5750972
Bloom would claim that objectivity is cheap, and that it's a deep subjectivity that is truly rewarding in appreciating literature

>>5750972
You want profundity, its not going to be what you find written on a Chipotle bag, pleb.

>>5750936
Jay Wright's poems all seem like they go on too long, and I can see why they go on so long because they have this great kind of build and symphonic structure but it's at the cost of any attention to detail after the first couple stanzas

but this general point is so right. can't comment on Toni Morrison, but my point of reference for this is Chinua Achebe who writes like if a slightly-above-average /pol/ thread tried to brainstorm an imaginary African writer, while Tayyeb Salih balances nostalgic maximalist elegance with the demands of modern prose and a concern for the reader better than any other writer on the planet and gets slept on.

>>5750318
Bloom is the last of his kind. We'll miss him when he's gone.

>>5750986
Yes, I read season of migration to the north and I agree that it is a very good book. All I needed to read from Achebe was his criticisms of Heart of Darkness to discard him. I don't think he's smart at all.

>>5750986
>Tayyeb Salih
Hm Bloom includes Achebe in his Western Canon, but not Salih. I wonder how he'd feel if he found out that his OWN opinions are being influenced by the "School of Resentment." ;)

>>5750998
Not that guy but <shrug> dont have to agree with him on every single book.

>>5750992
nah, I'd say there's something rare but eternally recurring to Bloom's type, he's part of a long line.

there will be others, because somebody has to say the truth

Everything goes in cycles and I hope we're entering an age when the Bloom types are no longer marginalized and publicly shamed in academia.

I think non-white people have a skepticism of Bloom because they've been told that he doesn't speak for them, but that's not true. Bloom speaks for literature and literature speaks for everyone. Everyone's human.

>>5750611
>Comparative estimates of value are really inferences, most valid when silent ones, from critical practice, not expressed principles guiding its practice. The critic will find soon, and constantly, that Milton is a more rewarding and suggestive poet to work with than Blackmore. But the more obvious this becomes, the less time he will want to waste in belaboring the point. For belaboring the point is all he can do: any criticism motivated by a desire to establish or prove it will be merely one more document in the history of taste. There is doubtless much in the culture of the past which will always be of comparatively slight value to the present. But the difference between redeemable and irredeemable art, being based on the total experience of criticism, can never be theoretically formulated.

-Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

>I'd love to hear any modern literary critics comment on the historical setting's relevance of the Iliad

This is a valuable part of Homeric studies, e.g. pic related.

>>5750948
That's commendable, wonder if he's ever read Susan Howe or Lyn Hejinian.

Bloom's critical writing isn't even very good. He's on point when it comes to his assessment of modern education and the importance of classical works, but I swear he's never said a god damned thing of interest regarding any of those works.

>>5751070
Don't know what he thinks of them specifically, but he's expressed an aversion to the Language poets in general.

>>5751083

Did you read his 'Blake's Apocalypse'?

>>5751083
I thought what he said about great writers was very illuminating.

Paraphrasing, he said that great writers were people who could make us incorporate their strangeness into what was normal.

Wow just read that Eagleton review. You would think that since Eagleton and his pseudoMarxist collaborators have won, they would stop kicking Bloom while he's down. But no... the ultimate in scumbag bloodthirstiness. What permits this? Oh yeah, relativism.

>>5751459
>won

they haven't won anything. by (a negative) definition they're in a permanent state of confusion and loathing without a clue as to what they're actually even motivated or defined by (the same tribalism that animates every movement, that they think they're above). history will churn their useless, dishonest frettings into dust.

how can a stance that continually upturns itself, that defines itself against a moving definition of 'that guy whose better than you who you hate' possibly last?

>>5751506
*who's

>>5751506
Yes history will bury them.

>>5751459
Eagleton's a non-representative asshole, who similar to Bloom has said almost nothing of interest since the seventies.

>>5750318
> attacking Bloom for being not SJW enough, not for his abysmal taste and jew-centeredness
Yes, it really is going to hell and we are in that handbasket.

bloom is the scaruffi of the literary world

>>5751023
>Bloom speaks for literature and literature speaks for everyone. Everyone's human.

Nice one.

They're clearly frustrated not because literature doesn't speak for them, but because literature does not speak for them only.

>>5750354
Because lit is full of pseudo-intellectual NEETs like us who have a superiority complex.

>aesthetics have always been political.

This is what retarded lit majors ACTUALLY believe.

>>5751840
Nope. They're actually nothing alike.

>>5751930
yes they are

>>5750936
>implying racism and misogyny is not good trait to have

>>5752103
Harold Bloom has been teaching literature at Yale for 60 years and is an expert on the subject, while Scaruffi is just a dilettante in comparison when it comes to music, and it shows in his writing.

>>5752166
no he isnt

>>5752316
Oh, come now. Scaruffi has only scratched the surface of singles-based genres and iffy on non-western music. For someone who thinks he's taking on an encyclopedic project, he's incredibly limited.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00545dp

I don't know if people outside the UK can listen to this, but Bloom gets a total fucking beatdown from a feminist literature professor on Shakespeare. It's hilarious hearing him squirm.

>>5752445
>that
>a beatdown
bloom pwned her

>>5750372
Apoliticality automatically supports status quo by allowing it to exist unquestioned.

>>5752429
the only music that matters is rock

>>5752166

How many languages does Bloom know?

>reactionary
massivekek

>2014
>complaining about white men
I thought fad was over?

>>5750870
>Eagleton
>relevant ever
hahaha

>>5752495
That's like saying that being agnostic supports the church because it allows the status quo to exist.

You're a fucking retard.

>>5752731
Not quite. Better is abstaining from voting in an "Affirm/Deny" situation where your lack of vote defaults to 'No.'

>>5750318
>The problem with the canon, as loose as it already is, was developed by bourgeois, heterosexual, white, (mostly) conservative men.

>tfw Bloom already has your face

ITT: Literary criticists take a literay critcist seriously

it's funny that he's described as a reactionary for supporting Shakespeare, when Shakespeare was the revolutionary kike writing degenerate shit for the masses and profaning everything sacred of his own day

>>5752754

The thing is your lack of no does not always default to No; it can default to Yes if the Yes ends up winning.

The whole "neutrality means you're siding with the oppressor" is a bullshit argument used by people trying to shame you into supporting them. Also in our current "democratic" countries, particularly the US, there are lots of ethical reasons to be apolitical; in the sense of not voting.

Also, genarally everyone who talking about how literature needs to be analysed via politics seems to imagine that capitalism has been around forever. Capitalism is quite a new economic system as far as history is concerned. In five hundred years time there will still be literature, but there may very well not be capitalism.

>>5753368
>The thing is your lack of no does not always default to No; it can default to Yes if the Yes ends up winning.

How so? Abstaining only detracts from 'Yes,' never 'No' given the most commonly used systems (that is, assuming abstainers aren't removed from the total voter count).

Also I wasn't taking a stance on this argument -- how fitting, hah -- I just wanted to demonstrate a better example because I found yours a bit off-base.

>>5753331
Tolzty pls

>>5753390

My first time commenting on this. And one's lack of vote does not equal No; it supports the majority, which is not always No.

>>5753422
It only supports the majority if abstaining removes them from the total count.

ie you need a majority to pass a law. 20 vote Y, 15 vote N, and 15 abstain. That's 20/50, the law doesn't pass. Now, if 27 vote Y, 13 vote N, and 10 abstain, it's 27/50 and it passes. In neither example does the abstainers changing to N affect the result, whereas in the first if they changed to Y it would have, because abstaining, in practice, functions as an N.

>>5753453
Now, if they are removed from the vote count, then the first example becomes 20/35 and it passes, thus helping the Y, but like I said that's not the common method and not the kind of system I'm referring to.

>>5750531
No, not really. Just abunch of words clouting up his main points of harold being a reactionary, harold being paranoid, harold being wrong, and best of all harold making baseless claims

He could do to read all of Hemingway's books and get a fucking clue on brevity. Verbal flamboyance has no place in an argument

>>5753453

Lets use your example only twist it -

A law is being changed in New York; 15 people vote No; 25 people vote Yes; and 15 abstain. Seems to me those 15 abstainers helped the Yes more than the No as the Yes won.

>>5754568
Right, I addressed that:

>(that is, assuming abstainers aren't removed from the total voter count).

Indeed, it is the case for any kind of 'either-or' situation. However, 'status quo v. change' situations generally require a majority (eg amendments to the US constitution), in which case abstains function as N's.

>Bloom rightfully calls out academics who value a person's skin color over the quality of their work
>those academics get mad at Bloom

How is this at all surprising?

>be white male
>be awesome at everything and run entire world
>non-white non-males do nothing but whine about you despite never contributing or creating anything themselves
>keep on being awesome and running entire world

>>5750727
Not that anon. You would accomplish some of the effects, but not all.

For instance, "fuck you" is blunt and rude but clear, while conveying "fuck you" in a iambic pentameter poems would be perhaps more funny or impressive, and perhaps would rekt your opponent more powerfully, but could also be, depending on your skilll with meter, more pretentious, or clumsy. It wouldn't affect the same people, and wouldn't affect those it affects in the same way.

For instance why paint when you could just write a portrait that say "this guy is bald and six feet high and has a strange look on his eye that I don't like" ?

Clearly form matters, if not to the intent of the artist, at least to those who view his art.

>>5752588
All of the major Western European languages plus Hebrew and Yiddish, so around 10 at least

>>5752588
oh and he definitely knows Greek and Latin

>>5750363
>The idea that you can analyze literature independently of economics is itself a economic position.
>The idea that you can analyze literature independently of philosophy is itself a philosophical position.
>The idea that you can analyze literature independently of history...
>The idea that you can analyze literature independently of gastronomy...

Step down idiot

>>5752445
Lol she doesn't like the way Hamlet uses the word "whore"

>>5754659
down the memory hole it goes

>>5754622
>academics who value a person's skin color over the quality of their work

Do these actually exist?

>>5755239
do you need to ask? if they didn't exist nobody would read, say, langston hughes

>>5755251
I think a few people might be reading Langston Hughes either way

>>5755228
I'll repost it for you because mods are fags

>be white male
>be awesome at everything and run entire world
>non-white non-males do nothing but whine about you despite never contributing or creating anything themselves
>keep on being awesome and running entire world

>>5755270
While this is true, I also think it's a good thing that we let women and blacks feel like they're contributing as well, just to be nice.

The white male race should be noble masters, iMO.

>>5755251
You make an excellent point, nobody reads minority poets unless literature professors tell them to.

>>5755291
Nobody really reads literature at all unless literature professors tell them to (with some exceptions that prove the rule).....

>>5755270
>white men invented everything, except all the many, many things they didn't

Go home, /pol/ cancer

>>5755344
Except those things aren't "many, many," but rather miniscule compared to what white people did

>>5755360
chinks invented everything

>>5755360
White men specifically I mean, not giving the women any credit they don't deserve either

>>5755344
>Gunpowder is noble until you use it to conquer the globe

>>5755361
No they didn't

>>5755365
everything

>>5755372
Not quite

>>5755210
This logic doesn't make any sense. Your entire post is a strawman.

>>5750369
Well New Athiests followers of scienticism act like the religious to fill the god shaped whole in their lives because they cant into philosophy. .. so your friend was half right.

>>5755362
You're horribly misinformed. Learn history before you keep spreading your idiocy.

Here, start with China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions

>>5755545
Sorry but no one uses chopsticks any more, Anonymous

>>5752429
Fenriz from Darkthrone and several other european DJs are all much more knowledgable than that fuck, but they dont toot their own horns like faggots and quietly post on their blogs like respectable people.

>>5753331
It amazes me that people get away with shitting on Shakespeare at all. This is why I left uni.

>>5750953
just skimming this trash thread.
but you, anon, well said.

>>5755578
>people get away with shitting on Shakespeare
[citation needed]

>>5755578
oh yeah? that's why you left?
uh huh.
are you a king of infinite nut?

poetry and literary criticism are gay though lol

>>5755623
good point imo

>>5755381
>Not quite
Actually yes, they invented "quite" too.

>>5755210
You think your straw man is wrong? Take a closer look. Analyzing literature " " " is always a position on the subject of analysis (or lack thereof). Whether or not a bias with regard is articulated or intentional has no bearing on whether or not it is a position being held by the person doing the analysis.

>>5755623
I also, as a person posting on the literature board, believe this.

>>5755667
Damn

>>5755623
seconded, lets sex now

>There are people on 4chan right now taking the piss out of a highly respected, more read that the collective of people here, author of many books university professor who themselves have never finished uni or made any contribution to literary studies

>>5758530
Isn't it the case for literally every board on 4chan? Do you actually think /pol/tards take genetics courses? Or even economics courses for that matter?

>>5758554
Obviously.

>>5758530
You don't need to be a chef to know if the food tastes like dog shit.