/lit/ - Literature

where's Thomas Pynchon?

>>6419883
off in memeland

>4 women

sexist pig

>>6419878
>No ancients at all

What the fuck. Are you sure this is real.

>canon
>giving a good God damn

Why do people worry about this kind of thing?

>>6419935

the ancients were spirit-worshipping retards

No Doystievsky? That list's bullshit.

Where's hemingway?

>>6419878
>Freud

>>6419942
bloom explains it fairly himself: there is too little time in life to read everything worth reading, so we all need some kind of idea of the most important authors and works

>>6419952
>Russians
>Western

No idea why Tolstoy is on the list either

>>6419887
Yeah it's surprising he included even that many.

>>6419971
Russians belong to the same literary tradition that Europeans do

>>6419971
Imperial Russia was Western due to effort made by Peter the Great.

>>6419965
Life is too short to dedicate your reading time to someone's arbitrary idea of essential reads

>>6419935
Here's the list of 100 authors he talks about in his book Genius. Includes a few ancients

>>6419989
It isn't completely arbitrary. He's an expert in this subject

Daily reminder Harold Bloom is literally mocked in serious academia for his reactionary and "culture studies boogeyman" stances.

He is the Cliffnotes of highbrow literature.

Too many women and he overrates poetry.

>>6420015
what a fool, doesnt he know that diversity quotas are more important than aesthetic quality

>>6420015
It depends on who you ask.

>>6420019
The women on that list are just as good as most of the men. I'm sorry you can't appreciate poetry

>>6420020
He claims that people want to tear down the academic consensus of Shakespeare, Milton etc, when nobody wants to do any such thing. People just want to bring diversity into literary study, not just in the sense of different writers, but also bringing in historical perspectives which is central in understanding how a work came to be conceived.

Also, none of Blooms books have any real insight into literature. It is always surface level opinions and reactionary garbage.

>>6419878

Why is he counting Freud as a writer?

He is a very good prose stylist but he's not a writer in the sense that Shakespeare or Dickens are.

>>6420040
>He claims that people want to tear down the academic consensus of Shakespeare, Milton etc, when nobody wants to do any such thing.
Pretty sure he never specifically claimed this. He just doesn't like that writers and poets he doesn't think are particularly good are held up at the same level, whether for political reasons or not.

>also bringing in historical perspectives which is central in understanding how a work came to be conceived.
I doubt he has anything against historical scholarship, but he doesn't want it replacing the kind of aesthetic (pseudo-religious?) criticism he likes.

>>6420040
many in academia want to shift the focus of literary studies from a study of literature for its own sake with a strong grounding in reading established classics primarily for their literary content toward a focus on diversity for its own sake and a preoccupation with the political and identity concerns with relatively less study of classic literature and relatively more on popular culture.

no one is necessarily saying the consensus on shakespeare or milton as great and important writers needs to be reversed just as no one (or few) are saying that looking at race/gender issues through literature shouldn't be done at all. but there's a blatant drive to push general focus of literary education at the grad and undergrad level and literary criticism to the latter side.

>>6419878

I have to be honest, I don't really like Bloom's criticism much at all. It's arrogant and elitist, always trying to find 'the best' of such and such. He's deliriously fawning in a sort of 'screaming girl at a Bieber concert' sense when he deals with 'great' writers, arrogantly dismissive and insulting when he deals with 'bad' writers. It doesn't come across well to me at all.

>>6420057
That's just how he reads and appreciates Freud. He also includes Montaigne and he includes several philosophers in >>6419999

>>6420030
Austen wrote trashy bodice-rippers and would have written Hunger Games if she were alive today.

>>6420076
And Shakespeare would have directed the Transformers movies.

/lit/, despite its own arguments otherwise, is a hivemind of teenagers masturbating to "meme" authors. Harold Bloom, though I disagree with his opinions on contemporary literature, is one of the most important, and certainty well-known, critics we have today. I hope you're not expecting anything but reactionary /r9k/-esque criticism from this thread.

Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, No, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, No, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, No, No, Yes

>>6420083
What's wrong with Neruda?

>>6420060
>>6420065

I agree that diversity should be treated with suspicion, but Bloom goes about it in an entirely stupid way. He is the embodiment of an old angry man shouting at what the kids of today are up to.
People study Shakespeare and whoever else more than they did when he was a student. It's just that academia is moving towards a wider field of study than just centralising on a handful of authors.

He acts as if Shakespeare is being replaced with E.L James.

>>6420076
Yeah man, go get 'em!

>>6420089
>He is the embodiment of an old angry man shouting at what the kids of today are up to.

This is the worst, most off base caricature of bloom you so often hear.

I honestly am left wondering if you have seen anything by him past 4chan comments because he is sweet old man incarnate.

>>6420083
>all of this project superiority
If you hate /lit/ this much, why are you here?

I think the 'diverse' literature shit is BS. I agree with the point that 'more perspectives gives a better overall understanding' thing in theory, I just don't think that is really what motivates the diversity crowd. They actually just want it because of their political agenda; the 'diverse perspectives' thing is just a backwards rationalization. Further, from what I've seen in course syllabi, their choice of 'minority literature' is peculiar. When they try to cover black art, they don't examine literature that's actually relevant to the black experience, they always study whitewashed black authors who wrote specifically to appeal to these types of PC academics.

>>6419965

Sure, make lists of influential writers or the most important works or whatever crap it is you want to do. But the idea of a "canon" that is of any relevance is ridiculous and reading nothing but shitty old books because you don't have "enough time" is plain dumb. Books communicate ideas and are products of their times. Why wouldn't you read mostly contemporary books and poems? Is your intention in life just to live the same one as those that went before you hoping you will form part of a mold that will reach the platonic ideal of the "well read person"?

>>6420040
>Also, none of Blooms books have any real insight into literature. It is always surface level opinions and reactionary garbage.

I thought that too until I read his book about Wallace Stevens. I'm guessing he only jumped the shark in the '90s when he came up with his "School of Resentment" theory and wrote The Western Canon. His early work on the Romantics looks worth reading.

>>6420139

Well, there is the problem that the great classic authors are better than most current ones. Reading current books is like looking at current art; these media are just kind of 'dead' in modern times and there' not really anything interesting going on. All the valuable creative work these days is being done in music and highbrow television. There aren't really any books being written now that are pushing the button of culture forward; it's like sculpture or post-modern art, there's just not anything good being written. Now there could be some merit in reading hip hop lyrics, for instance, but I get the feeling that's not what you're trying to say. I get the feeling you're one of these people who thinks that say Franzen is something more than bullshit for academics to justify their existence with.

>>6420126

Hes right faggot. And there is good stuff on /lit/ its just often so frustratingly bogged down with retards like you.

Good thing however, its usually quite easy to tell who is who.

>projected superiority.
thanks for the laugh anon.

>>6420160
>All the valuable creative work these days is being done in music and highbrow television.

This is what plebs actually believe.

>>6420160
>music and highbrow television
lol which ones

>>6420153
He's fine on the stuff he is passionate about. But he is a marketing tool now putting his name to an ever increasing number of books on authors he scarcely cares about, mostly just repeating other critics.

>>6419878
> Freud
> motherfucking (literally) Freud
Jews, it's always the Jews, I don't even...

>>6420160

The novel is really only 150 years old. It's a baby art form and there are plenty of interesting writers from the last 30 years that are pushing the envelope.

I guess you just need someone to tell you what is good because you can't think for yourself or go into a fucking bookshop and pick up something new.

You're ignorant and pathetic.

>jane Austen
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAA

>>6420200
>The novel is really only 150 years old.

Apuleius and Murasaki Shikibu might dispute that.

>>6420214
Yes she is rather humorous isn't she.

>>6420190
This is true, actually. Recently there have even been books published in his name that he didn't contribute a single word to, anthologies of criticism on recent authors George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Franzen, Junot Diaz and Michael Chabon. I doubt Bloom actually likes any of those authors.

>>6420214
This. No cunt ever wrote a good book.

>>6420227
More like WOMANLY and thus WORTHLESS

>>6420221
They wouldn't. The novel as a literary genre really began in the 18th century.

>>6420200

You live in a fucking bubble reading shit your overprivileged compadres told you was important when any idiot with half a brain could tell you that the novel is not relevant in 2015. Even if there's stuff being done that's technically good, it hasn't got a lick of significance culturally as evinced by the fact that there aren't any culturally relevant, and that limits is proper audience to hobbyists. The average person is not going to get any deeper understanding of today's world by reading novels except maybe looking into pulp lit like 50 Shades as a purely anthropological exploration seeking to explain why utter crap could be so popular.

That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with reading new novels, but it's not 'necessary to understand the Zeitgeist' the way it was in Austen or Dickens' day.

The Zeitgeist of the past decade is mainly carried by highbrow TV, pop music, Youtube, and some critical theory shit like Zizek. If you're interested in being informed about what the world is like today, that's the shit you should be looking at. Not fucking Franzen. On the other hand, the greats are necessary because they laid the backbone of Western culture and will therefore enhance your understanding of any era you happen to find yourself in.

>>6420234
>>6420235
Daytime /lit/

>>6420238
>cultural relevance
>Zeitgeist
>highbrow TV, pop music, Youtube, and some critical theory shit like Zizek
>highbrow, pop
jesus christ shut up

>>6420188
game of thrones

>>6420243
Trolls like you are ruining the board

>>6420088
Nothing at all, I just don't think he's central to the western canon.

>>6420250
Fair enough, but if Samuel Johnson isn't either, then what literary critic is?

>>6420246
I assume Anon was talking about The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, in which case that's all middlebrow junk

>>6420122
Just because he shares a love of literature doesn't mean his ideas about certain things are not backwards as all get out.

He is not a serious critic.

>>6420137
Why are you deliberately combining the noble intentions of diversity, which you yourself mention, with a few vocal minorities? That is definitely not how academia thinks.

>>6420257
He might not be the greatest critic, but I think he's fun, and I like that he promotes literature, which I think is good for something

>>6420238
Popular media is inherently disposable. You enjoy it and discard it. Serious art grows in stature with age; it both encapsulates and transcends its era. Television and pop music may achieve the former but almost never the latter.

Asked my prof to condense the English literary canon to one week's reading and he suggested:

Genesis --> Paradise Lost --> Frankenstein

Thoughts?

>>6420275
We all know this is bait

>>6420284
It isn't

>>6420275
Frankenstein is shit.

This is what truly highbrow, patrician television looks like

>>6419999
>Kabbalah in book reviews
Lol wut

>>6420275
Well Paradise Lost is a rewrite of Genesis in the Renaissance tradition, and Frankenstein is a rewrite of Paradise Lost and Genesis in the Romantic tradition, so there's a lot in there to provide a decent overview. It also takes you from scripture to the poem to the novel. I would say it's a very particular but reasonable response.

>>6420252
harold bloom

>>6420300
Something by Blake would be better than Frankenstein tbh

>>6420291
Why?

>>6420238

>Even if there's stuff being done that's technically good, it hasn't got a lick of significance culturally as evinced by the fact that there aren't any culturally relevant

That's completely circular but your whole point is just wrong. Half the shit in this Bloom guy was recommending was never popular outside of a literary bubble. Dickens wrote pulp shit that didn't even come out in novel form. There are plenty of popular novels still out. How could judge the "Zeitgeist of the past decade" without including Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire or any of those countless YA novels? They're not just marginally popular.

Not that it matters anyway. You don't read novels or poems or see plays to for a good measure of what's hot in pop culture which is essentially your criteria for interesting art. Whether or not it is in a bubble contemporary writers are creating interesting things that are pertinent to the time you are living in. By favouiring long dead writers because they are "important" you are kinda missing what is so brilliant about the novel.

>On the other hand, the greats are necessary because they laid the backbone of Western culture and will therefore enhance your understanding of any era you happen to find yourself in.

What a load of bullshit. I guess you'd get a clap in a literature department but reading fucking Hemmingway to get an understanding of today over a good contemporary is so fucking dumb.

>>6419999
I dont care about a few ancients being listed in a 100 person genius list. I want to know why he put in Samuel Beckett and Fernando Pessoa as being more central to the Western Canon than Homer and Ovid. This is a ridiculous list.

>>6420083
Go to bed harold.

>>6420372
They're just the ones he wanted to write about at the time.

>>6420329

LMAO. Dickens, Shakespeare, and Austen were all bestsellers or proto-Hollywood producers. The whole 'great artists obscure in their lifetime thing' is just false on the whole, barring a couple interesting examples. There are a couple examples of YA lit that have done stuff culturally but they got popular because they were made into movies or TV, which only affirms my point that literature is a marginalized medium these days; the standard by which fiction is judged these days is whether it gets made into an HBO or AMC show or a Hollywood blockbuster, that doesn't do any service to the notion that novels are indispensable today.

Shakespeare was the Breaking Bad of his day. Franzen and his ilk are the [insert forgotten Elizabethan authors here] of their day.

>>6419999
checked

how does Kabbalah play into writing, though?

>>6420400
First of all, these comparisons are dumb as fuck because they equate cultures that are just different. Popular culture in the Elizabethan era is just fundamentally different to popular culture these days, and it's (generally, not specific to you) annoying when people make these clumsy, inaccurate, meaningless analogies. I agree that there's an extent to which novels used to be mass blockbusters and central to the culture in a way that it's easy to miss. But calling Shakespeare the Breaking Bad of his day serves nothing.

Second, the connection between popularity/fame, and lasting quality, is just not as 1-to-1 as you want to make it out. Like, it's not even close. I'm not saying that a lack of popularity is a guarantor of quality; I'm saying that there just doesn't seem to be that much of a relationship either way. After all, who now reads the work of Hall Caine? Or Disraeli? Or Maria Edgeworth? Or it's interesting to look at someone like Melville - he was wildly successful, yes, but mostly because of works that have almost completely vanished, and the works of his that we still read, were not for the most part liked and were regarded as disappointment. Unless you're all about that Typee life or something.

There's just not much relationship that I can see. Some things that are immensely popular also seem to have lasting stature. Some things that are popular don't. Some things that are unpopular in the moment do have a life beyond that immediate reception. It's not really a reliable guide either way.

>>6420445
>Maria Edgeworth
She is in Bloom's Canon.

>>6420400

>Dickens, Shakespeare, and Austen were all bestsellers or proto-Hollywood producers.

Shakespeare was a playwright and the other two produced pulp shit.

>The whole 'great artists obscure in their lifetime thing' is just false on the whole, barring a couple interesting examples.

False dichotomy. Not obscure but equally pretending James Joyce was widely read is a lie. A lot of these writers were popular within a middle class bubble or for a while the literate bubble.

>that doesn't do any service to the notion that novels are indispensable today

I never suggested that novels are "indispensable" to pop culture. Some YA novels like Harry Potter clearly are very very popular and not because they were made into films.

Your argument is utterly pointless. I'm not arguing that the literary novel is popular. I'm telling you that contemporary novelists are relevant to contemporary reader and they are doing interesting things and they are saying things that are culturally relevant.

Do you just feel bad because the only contemporary writer you can even name is Franzen? I don't care if you read them. Reading only "important" works is about as plebby as it gets but whatever. I'm sure Dante really speaks to you.

>>6420451
But very few people read her.

>>6420456
Dickens and Austen are Rad, actually

>>6420456

Dude, novels are for faggots. Just STFU and WATCH (not read) Game of Thrones.

Dickens is actually something of an anomaly in that he had Harry Potter levels of popularity in his day, and is still respected by critics 100+ years later. That's something that never happens. Shakespeare and Austen weren't anywhere near that popular

>>6420160

Don't ever come back here again.

Fuck off.

>>6420470
>>Just STFU and WATCH (not read) Game of Thrones.

>watching SJW cuck shit made by homosexuals

>>6420474
> Austen isn't popular
Have you ever met a real-world (not 2D) woman? For example, your mom or your sister?

>>6420495
Read my post again and then try to discern the point I was making.

>>6420485

This post actually made me feel bad :(

>>6419999
>Socrates

This nigga shitting me?

>>6419942
It sustains the entire circlejerk which is academia

>>6420243
he's right. women writers are shit.

woolf, eliot, plath, the lot. All trash. they just don't seem to have the brain for it.

>>6420238
Thanks for the laugh m8.
Remember to stay in school!

>>6420404
It's quirky and it shows that he read Kabbalah omg so edgy

>>6420518
Woolf and Eliot are considered two of the greatest novelists of all time, like top 20 tier

>>6420526
Kabbalah isn't even remotely anything that could be called edgy and he only does it because he's a Jew

>>6419965
>life is short so people should all experience these authors that I like

>>6420571
Yeah, becuse they're the best 1s

>>6419999

> Nietzsche
> Binah

OK, I'm hardly an expert on Kabbalah, but this strikes me as a little bit strange. I'd always heard Binah explained as kind of a womanly wisdom, a sort of knowing-what's-best. Nietzsche, though I love him to death, never struck me as smart in that way... He always struck me as more if a prodigious clairvoyant with absolutely no moral bearings. I wouldn't call him 'wise', he just understood human beings really, really well.

>>6420585
>I know what's best so I don't recommend books, I declare them canon to reading at all.

>>6420593
Bloom describes "Binah" as "intelligence-as-realized-knowledge, or a prism breaking open illumination into what can be apprehended," and gives Nietzsche's concept of "perspectivism" as an example.

>>6420536
Lol SJW bullshit

>>6420690
They might have been interested in social justice (?), but that doesn't make them bad writers.

Ironically, the King James Bible has had more of an impact on the Western cannon than anything else.

>>6420622

In what work is this sort of thing explored.

I'm VERY interested in reading it...

>>6420708
ironically you're a fucking idiot

>>6420708
How is that ironic you rancid swine?

>>6420708
Bloom wrote a book about literary appreciation of the KJV

>>6420722
It only had ironic influence because the bible is postmodern

>>6420708
In fact, Bloom considers William Tyndale one of the greatest writers in the English language, along with Shakespeare and Milton

>>6420718
Bloom would probably recommend something by Gershom Scholem, maybe his book Kabbalah

>>6420732
>the greatest writers all lived 500 years ago
this just makes it obvious that his opinions are nothing but reactionary nostaglia

>>6419878
Neruda is from Chile OP

>>6420766
He puts Dickens and Joyce on nearly the same level

>>6420766
>>6420772
Clearly a nostalgia of when he was waiting for the next installment of Dickens` newest novel in All the Year Round.

>>6420518
Woolf is the best english writer of c20th

>>6420214
easiest way to spot a pleb ever is not liking austen

>>6420722
Cos its not a western bpok

>>6421081
She was a boring satirist.

>>6421083
The King James Bible was written by English men.

>>6421078
If you mean from England specifically, then maybe

>>6420161
Yeah, you sure are the only intelligent person on this board. It's amazing how you manage to grace our cognitively hobbled corner of the Internet with your borderline omniscient genius. You're writing totally doesn't read like an overly pretentious teenager who thinks the only reason he comes of as edgy is because society can't handle his genius, let alone /lit/.

>>6419878
>What does /lit/ think?

Too many cis-white-het males.

>>6420722
because the bible is an incoherent fairy tale for people who believe in imaginary friends.

>>6421831
that's actually not what it is at all. you don't seem to understand the context in which religions develop.

>>6421831
Actually it's quite coherent, has more in common with the fable genre than the fairy tale, and can be appreciated by anyone interested in literature.

>>6421831
it's never too late to ask for salvation anon

>>6420571
how do you know if a book is good before you read it?

>>6422034
bada bing bada boom baby it's as simple as that

>>6420372
I can swallow Beckett, but Pessoa is ridiculous enough to discredit his judgement. Unless Bloom had sex with him or something. Which is entirely improbable.

>>6422209
Yeah it's not like Pessoa is considered one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century or anything like that..........

>>6419935
he's not actually listing the authors he thinks are best in either this or the genius list. it's not a list of the authors he thinks are most central. they are lists of authors he wanted to write about. also, the genius list is not really ordered, other than the top 5 all being top tier or whatever along with a few others he's scattered around.

>>6422230
4chan is too autistic to figure out basic shit like this, and instead just rage for the dumbest reasons

>>6421078
Uhhh Conrad? wtf

>>6422249
He's not originally from England, but he and D. H. Lawrence seem to be the only other possibilities

>>6422249
i think woolf is better than conrad and conrad is only sort of english anyway

>>6419999
>Muhammad

>>6422270
seriosly. all of the Jews are one thing but u expect me to read ducking MOSLEMS?? ._. no thx

This is a fucking trainwreck of a thread and I am loving every minute of it.

Thanks for the game, boys.

>>6422034

How does someone's having put that book on a list solve this problem?

>>6419878
No, it doesn't work. No "H" "L" or "Y" author, multiple C and M.. we need a good alphabet list.
Austen, Beckett, Cervantes, Chaucer, Dickens, Eliot, Freud, Goethe, ___, Ibsen, Johnson, Kafka, etc.

>>6422270
Inbred yokels, please leave.

>>6419878
Dickens has no place on this list.

Also Nerudo is overrated, Bloom could have picked a better poet like Octavio Paz.

>>6422569
He includes Paz but not Neruda in his book Genius

>>6422569
>Dickens has no place on this list.

Dickens is extremely influential you charlatan

>>6419878
>Picking the wrong Eliot for your list
>Bloom

Let's get this shit started.

>>6422587

I don't care if he's influential, he's a shit writer. Dostoevsky is more deserving, and I'd argue more influential.

>>6422598
lol no way

just fuck off you dont know anything

>>6422569
if you actually read his chapter on neruda iirc it's basically an excuse for him to say neruda is worse than borges and whitman

>>6422662
Lol Bloom is the best.

>>6419878
>Jane Austen

I'm starting to suspect that the general respect for Austen is a big joke that I'm not in on. The work itself bears no relation to the laudatory stuff that's written about.

>>6422696
what do you like

>>6420510
Wait, what's wrong with Socrates?
(I'm newfwag pls no bully)

>>6422746
He never wrote anything.

>>6422758
he has him joint listed with plato anyway

>>6422758
What the fuck is he famous for then?

>>6421831
*unzips fedora*

And yet Paul's Epistles make no appearance...

>>6423565
in Genius he lists saint paul as one of the 100 writers, saying "Paul's literary genius is beyond doubt"

>>6419878
>Jane Austen
>Emily Dickinson
>Virginia Woolf
>Charles Dickens

>>6423565
>And yet Paul's Epistles make no appearance...
Don't worry, have a healthy (?) dose of Freud instead.

The Jews, the motherfucking Jews... *shakes head*

>>6421078
>>6420536
>>6422257
what is there to like about Woolf? she's literally just a boring, watered down Joyce, there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of writers who capture modernism in a way that easily outshone her, why the fuck would you spend your time reading that?

>>6423590
Does he base that on all the epistles attributed to Paul or just the ones with consensus authenticity?

>anglocentrism

>>6423596

>Emily Dickinson is bad

Keep reading, newreader.

>>6423608
>hundreds of writers

Gonna need a gew examples there.

The only 2 i can think of writing in english who are (arguably) on par with her are joyce and faulkner.

>>6422249
Aint that good

Is Bloom a closet atheist or does he actually respond to Nietzsche's critique of Abrahamic faith?

>>6424228

It's not that simple. He supports OT and the Koran, he's against the NT and Buddhist writings. It's not so much about Abrahamic vs. Pagan that concerns Nietzsche as life-affirming vs. life-denying.

>>6424260
>It's not so much about Abrahamic vs. Pagan that concerns Nietzsche as life-affirming vs. life-denying.
But Nietzsche cared more about the latter too. The point is that these religions are not the best source for ethics or aesthetics (or cosmology and physics) so why would you follow that faith rather than merely read it?

>>6424228
Here's an interesting interview that explains it: http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/bloom_hartman/bloom/bloom.html

He believes in God because it's more fun that way.

>>6424228


HB: No, no I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist.

JB: True! But what alternative is there?

HB: Well, the alternative is to entertain all of these fictions. Remembering what Uncle Wallace taught us, which is that the final belief he says is to believe in a fiction, with the nicer aspects of belief, that knowing that what you believe in is not true. It's just imaginatively much more interesting to be a Gnostic rather than an agnostic, to be fascinated by Yahweh rather than indifferent to him. Walt Whitman liked to say that the United States are in themselves the greatest poem. Alas they're not, but it's a nice idea. Yahweh is a great poem. [Pause.] I don't think Jesus Christ is a great poem. [Pause.] I never quite make up my mind about Allah, though I'm fascinated by the fact that the Koran is the only book I've ever read in which every single phrase is spoken by God himself. It is the voice of Allah that you hear from the beginning to the end, supposedly by mediation of the angel Gabriel, being dictated to Mohammed, who however doesn't write it down because supposedly he's an illiterate, which baffles me, because he's a successful merchant, and how could you have been a successful merchant if you were illiterate, and couldn't read or write? But supposedly he memorizes it and then he dictates it—a very suspicious process of course, but then no more suspicious than the formation of Tanakh or the Greek New Testament. I don't say it in this book, because I had said it in the book just before, called Where Shall Wisdom be Found, in the chapter there that reprints with a few modifications a commentary that I'd written on the Gnostic or quasi-Gnostic Gospel of Thomas,—I ask every New Testament theologian I've known in this life the same question; I've asked the great Pelikan this question, at which he had just shrugged his shoulders and walked off smiling amiably: How is it that we don't have an Aramaic Gospel? Why is there no Nazarene Gospel? Even though we know that no one who wrote anything that is now in the New Testament had ever seen the historical Jesus, had ever heard him say a word, nevertheless, for any of this to make even an iota of sense, that person did not go around speaking Koiné, speaking demotic Greek. He went around speaking Aramaic. Aramaic and demotic Greek are totally different languages. The nuances of thought, expression and spirituality of one are not readily translatable into the other. How could you believe that you were hearing the ipsa verba, the actual words of the incarnate God, and not write them down and preserve them? And what makes me even more suspicious is, you will notice, as though they throw it in to show the authenticity of this inauthentic schmaltz, all through the Gospels suddenly you're thrown a phrase or two in Aramaic, including, you know, the last words spoken from the Cross. Why? And where's the rest of it?

>>6424445
>>6424454
>It's more fun
I don't see how that is necessarily true. Does he not consider atheism a kind of faith (but obviously more scientific)?

>>6424454

That's a pretty idiosyncratic sense of 'belief'. He kind of comes off as an atheist who wants to sound more interesting than just saying he's a 'cultural Abrahamist' or whatever.

>>6424489
He thinks science (and philosophy) is boring.

>>6424492
He also thinks Shakespeare's characters are real people.

>Western Canon
>2015

Really? REALLY?

>>6424492

Cultural abrahamism is such faggotry.

>>6424492
i think you have an overly simplistic perspective

>>6424523

How so?

>>6424503

Jaysis. What a tosser.

>>6424493
Probably because his level of literary appreciation is so great that his equivalent faculties for sci and phil are worthless. And he jumps to the conclusion that those things are boring themselves.

However, literature is entertainment (art is nature reorganised for enjoyment) and those things are less so. Therefore they are less fun at the highest level? But that applies less so to philosophy where we create ethics and aesthetics from nature. Maybe philosophy is most fun then. IDK.

>>6419878
Good start.

Anglo-centric list.
Only Anglophones care about Chaucer etc.

You could could cut out almost all Anglophones except Shakespeare.

>>6424553
I think he just finds people more interesting than ideas.

>>6424737
English lit > lit of any other living language. Suck it up johnny foreign.

>caring about any opinions on literature that a man who only knows one language has

ayy fucking lmao.

>>6424993
>English lit > lit of any other living language.
Your statement would carry significantly more weight if you at least spoke, e.g., Russian or Chinese.

>>6424996
Bloom was born in New York City, the son of Paula (Lev) and William Bloom. He lived in the South Bronx at 1410 Grand Concourse.[5][6] He was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a Yiddish-speaking household, where he learned literary Hebrew;[7] he taught himself English at the age of six.[8]

>>6425022
>Yiddish

Doesn't count.

>>6425022
Oh yeah, the immense Yiddish literary tradition, how could I forget, lol.

>>6424993
And any dead language including Greek and Latin

>>6424993
Here's how it goes, buddy.

French lit > Russian lit > German lit > Italian lit > English lit > Everything else

Only reason you're not lower is because of Shakespeare singlehandedly carrying the entire language.

>>6424996
>who only knows one language
Why do you retards keep lying about this? He can read at least 7

>>6425057
>French lit > Russian lit > German lit > Italian lit > English lit > Everything else
Your Eurocentrism is showing pig

Bloom reads Greek, Latin and Hebrew for ancient languages, and English, French, Spanish, Yiddish and I believe German and Italian for modern languages. But somehow Anon here magically came to the conclusion out of nowhere that he only knows one language.

>>6420002
He's an expert on a subject where experts will disagree about anything and everything. And he himself said that what's more important in reading is what is subjective, whatever objective is left is rather poor.

Also

>every writer born after 1500, except Chaucer and Dante
>Samuel Johnson in the short list of 26 most central authors in the Western Canon
>expecting anyone to not be bored with at least a handful of those writers

No thanks. I'll come up with my own list.