/lit/ - Literature

>>6650430
Harold Boom (not a typo) is the worst meme.

>>6650436
When did he become a meme?

>>6650443

>hb will die in your lifetime

>>6650436
>>6650464
Seriously why? Don’t tell me you actually disagree with his quote in the OP.

>>6650479
He occasionally makes some good points but overall he's a massive blowhard and extremely unprofessional.

>academia will collapse in your lifetime

>>6650430
Oh my god.

>>6650430
>unironically calling a professional journalist, "young man".
What a fat old douchebag. Harold Bloom hate aside, it's true that making literature about identity politics is lame and causes undergraduates to focus on a narrow range of critical approaches.

What do we do about this, bros? Oh wait. We are all a product of this system. We can hardly fix ourselves.

>>6650516
What's wrong with that? My grandfather is almost ninety, and he calls just about anyone under the age of forty a "young man". It's an old person thing

I legitimately don't understand why anybody should go to college nowadays to study literature.

>>6650516
>I demand respect I haven't earned. I firmly believe it is owed to me for no reason whatsoever.
Die, young man.

Academia is shit. I didn't independent research during my undergrad and my advisor told me I didn't "namedrop enough literary references and authors" in my paper.
Most professors over 45 years of age need to retire cause they have nothing interesting to say anymore.

>>6650535
Because however good or bad the classes may be, it gives me the opportunity to read a lot of great literature and form my own opinions. If I put forth a good amount of effort, I'll end up with a bachelor's degree.

>>6650547
>If I put forth a good amount of effort, I'll end up with a bachelor's degree.
this doesn't require effort anon

>>6650516
The A.V. Club is full of shitty journalists and they deserve to be abused.

>>6650552
This. Most online publications are trash

>>6650551
This. A lot of retards get BAs in literature. It literally requires no effort other than showing up to class

>>6650430
Does Harold Bloom eat nutty gizzards?

>>6650533
My grandfather's in his eighties and only says that to be condescending.
>>6650543
Boomer detected. Accepting cash from someone in exchange for an interview and not treating them with respect is at best unprofessional.

"Publish or perish" killed academia. Not only is it a quantity over quality approach, but it seems to me that it leads to the proliferation of shitty theories because the development of a new theory then creates the opportunity to apply the theory to the range of stock topics and tropes, and even other theories (BAM, that many more papers to publish) regardless of the legitimacy or explanatory power of the theory.

I suspect this is part of the rise of identity politics in academia, because it allows for an almost endless permutation of academic papers that are easy to crank out: it requires little thought or imagination. I would say it isn't entirely about politics, and is largely just a pragmatic way for academics to ensure their survival and secure tenure.

>>6650590
>muh boomers
Please stop
Regardless to what degree it is valid, it is still annoying

>>6650470
>hb will die in your lifetime

>>6650547
>it gives me the opportunity to read a lot of great literature and form my own opinions

Yes, because it's impossible to do that outside academia.

Bloom is just bitching about North American Academia, right?

One of the things I hate most about academia is how expensive academic works or even fucking articles are from certain journals. Say what you want about organized religion but they understand that if you want to spread knowledge you don't charge $59.99 + tip per article for it.

>>6650597
>identity politics
You're correct. I didn't my undergrad thesis and ma thesis on Shakespeare and I encountered a proliferation --in the past 10 years -- of identity politics analyses of Shakespeare, specifically of othello and caliban and they all say the same exact thing. There's no profundity it's all the same

>>6650648
>modern sophists
hello darkness my old friend

>>6650601
Sorry to annoy, you gramps. Isn't it past your bedtime old fellow?

>>6650636
I think his intention is to critique North American academia, but this kind of problem happens in academia worldwide. I'm Brazilian and to study the humanities here is absolutely disgusting - a parade of identity politics and Frankfurt School dogmatism (as weird as that sounds).

>>6650712
U S P?

>>6650720
Unesp. I hear USP (ECA/FFLCH) have it even worse.

>>6650683
Isn't it past yours, young man?

>>6650654
It's probably even worse in the social sciences (my field). We're kinda responsible for the start of all this...sorry.

>>6650490
Considering he is the pinnacle of his profession, I'd say he defines professional. You just mean that word to say "I don't like him".

>>6650557
>showing up to class
holy shit, not even.
my lit classes have rarely peaked past 50% of the people who attend the first class attending class regularly. but they're all still at the final. makes no fucking sense to me.

He's absolutely right.

Who are good academics?

>>6650654
What would you propose as a method of studying literature if not through different lenses of inquiry?

This whole thread is identity politics; no has disputed harold bloom's statement in op, but they beat their chests because they are young leftists and must attack whoever are labeled reactionaries

>>6650774
Cambridge school intellectual historians and those they influenced. That's literally it in the humanities and social "sciences".

>>6650790
The irony of course being that almost every post here supports Harold Bloom and attacks anything that is considered postmodern or even modern, and yet people like you will argue against strawmen when you cannot even find posts that argue what you claim.

>>6650774
Catholic universities.

Hating HB is a meme that most people swallow completely thoughtlessly. He is hated precisely because he fights against identity politics, which have unambiguously ruined the American intellectual life. People don't hate him because he's some kind of "blowhard" or "rude old man." What childish nonsense.

>>6650793
The Cambridge school is willfully anti-intellectual. It's very convenient for Cambridge historians, who can immediately dismiss as irrelevant any discourse that challenges orthodoxy. But it basically fails to generate any discourse of its own worth mentioning —I have yet to find a plausible way to dismiss the concept that ideas like Marxism or feminism are fundamental to the way that people have historically read the world around them. If you want a better explanation of this, read Emile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life". It opposes everything that the Cambridge school stands for, and it does it with actual evidence, something that is sorely lacking in the Cambridge school.

>>6650774
Browse http://papers.ssrn.com/

>>6650799
You are right, I only dispute narrow interpretations of othello because I post on /pol/ and a hipster cucked me. Progress marches forward at another won internet argument

>>6650822
>I have yet to find a plausible way to dismiss the concept that ideas like Marxism or feminism are fundamental to the way that people have historically read the world around them
Because Marxism only arose about a century and a half ago?

>>6650597
You are correct. It is definitely a survival adaptation of english departments in universities everywhere.

English Departments have incentives to be a production line of subjectivities/perspectives/identities. These abstractions allow english academics to perform "creative readings" on anything in the entire corpus of human literature. ie. generate something new out of things that are otherwise 'old', irrelevant, dismissable, and 'backward'. (ie. identity politics allows academics to justify studying whatever literary works they enjoy or are attracted to)

If not for this, I don't know how they could possibly maintain their relevance or justify their existence. 'Stable' or 'rigid' authority about literature (whatever its source... whether it be religious, national, institutional, cultural movement, etc etc) just can't compete with the buzz of the next new thing, the exploitable power fluxuations that come out of the crises of constant change, and the promises of the myth of progress.

>>6650822
>he doesn't realise that all texts are historically situated speech acts
>he lets dead people speaking to dead debates do his thinking for him now

lmao

Exciting literary intellectuals still exist — just not in academia. The real work's being done at independent presses like NYRB. Edwin Frank is a giant in the shadows; he publishes great literature and doesn't give a fuck about identity politics.

>>6650516
The term young man isn't derogatory, Anon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HO2UVdgmYw

>>6650464
He is the sweetest man

>tfw looking at the scandals and replication crises going on even in fields much more empirically/scientifically bound than your own
>tfw realizing your own must be chock full of total horseshit
>tfw publish or perish
>tfw billions of politicized articles and PhD theses
>tfw billions of completely uninteresting articles and PhD theses that only exist to pad a CV
>tfw realizing you are committing yourself to a disgusting disingenuous industry that is going to collapse into its own anus within 30 years

>>6650837
but class arose far far before marxism, and marxism is to date the most powerful account of class

>>6650877
NYRB is godly
if they publish it, it's worth reading
it was NYRB that resurrected Stoner

>>6650430
><At 84 I lie awake at night, after a first sleep, and murmur Crane, Whitman, and Shakespeare to myself, seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall.

>>6651468
Bloom has lived the literary life we can only hope to.

ITT: Pompous whining.

>>6651560
It's just typical 4chan neurosis. Babyboomers/women/vocal minorities are frustrating my ambitions.

>>6651569
WHAT ARE YOUR HOPES AND DREAMS ANON

>>6651574
I-I c-can't remember anymore. They vanished right about the time my gf dumped me after the Marxist-feminist lit professor humiliated me in front of the class for saying that I found Spivak boring and confusing.

>muh view on literature is totally apolitical guize I swear!!!!

>>6650470
Not if you kill yourself with drugs, anon

>>6651585
>spivak boring
Why would you vocalize this in a liberal academic setting?

>>6651595
You're right but the night before I had been sharing at my MRM meeting and I guess I was so pumped up with the support from my bros that I forgot that as a heterosexual white Christian male from a middle class family I have no right to dissent from the official line in BHO's Progressive Caliphate.

>>6651585
ARE YOU LETTING CONTINGENTS ELEMENTS BREAK YOU ? DO YOU NOT KNOW ALL HUMANS ARE INHERENTLY LARGER THAN LIFE ?

DO YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE YOU LITTLE FUCKING FAGGOT ? WASTE. I FUCKING HATE WASTE AND YOU'RE WASTING YOUR LATENCY RIGHT NOW.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE WORST EMOTION IS ? REGRET. REGRET STEMS FROM POTENTIALITY AND POTENTIALITY IS ONLY EXHAUSTED FROM THE EXPLOITATION OF LATENCY

>>6651618
that sounds like Hopsin lyrics in prose

>>6651623
I HAVE NEVER FELT SO INSULTED IN MY LIFE

>>6651618
>tfw no 5/10 humanities major gf to exploit my latency

>>6650430
Who will fight against the school of resentment when he dies?

>>6650516
Die, young man.

>>6651419
"Class" doesn't exist. It's merely a description of the world adopted by certain people for certain purposes. You need to ditch your pathetic communist religion and see the world afresh from a more sensible point of view.

>>6651651
/lit/

It's up to us to take up arms against the rising tide of darkness.

I'm doing my part by being a straight white male author who uses words like nigger and faggot in my writing and writes for beauty above all else (thank you Corn Father).

None of this post is sarcastic, btw.

>>6651747
god bless you

This sucks, what are excessively dorky academic people like ourselves supposed to do if we can't go into academia anymore.

>>6651809
>born just in time to browse dank memes

>>6650516
Actually you shouldn't be focusing on any "critical approaches", but rather inventing your own

>>6651651
just have to get back traditional pagan values, just like last time the west got taken over by imported resentment ideology

>The Daemon Knows

the guy is clearly senile

>>6652118
It's a colloquialism, imbecile. Lurk moar

>>6650430
>Critical, young man, is hardly the word. I stand against it like Jeremiah prophesying in Jerusalem
This way of articulating yourself is cringeworthy,
in my opinion.

>>6652278
thats why he writes pop books for plebs and not real books

>>6652280
Its some where in the middle of what I might consider "high" and "low brow" and by no means are biblical allusions uninteresting,
but to use them in ordinary conversation, as well as a condescending "young man" is cringeworthy.

>>6652296
i don't know why ppl found "young man" such an insult, bloom is on death's door obviously he has a different perspective on life than some dude who just turned 40 last week

>>6652304
He made it his living to be brutally honest about what other people take extremely seriously,
so for what reason should we be any thing but overly critical of him without any remorse?

>>6652308
Your reasoning is stupid.

Why the hell do you put yourself in bondage on how you act by reacting to an old man you dont respect?

Even if the above was sane, being overly critical doesnt mean being trite and irrelevant.

Who the fuck cares if you had some old man talk to you in a nasty tone when calling you young man some years ago. I mean have you ever been to the south or the mid-west? People just talk differently in different places, you dense mother fucker.

>>6650552
Agreed. TBH anyone with self-esteem so fragile that they get butthurt when an old man calls them "young man" deserves it.

How to Read and Why takes us on a Cook's tour of some of its author's favourite poems, plays and novels, boring the reader with plodding plot summaries or ludicrously long quotations and then adding a few amateurish, undemanding comments. Thus, Maupassant is 'marvellously readable', the pleasures of great poetry are 'many and varied', while 'Shelley and Keats were very different poets, and were not quite friends'.

We are exhorted to chant a particular poem out loud repeatedly, and advised in an arresting flash of moral insight that 'in Raskolnikov's Petersburg, as in Macbeth's bewitched Scotland, we, too, might commit murders'. We are also instructed that 'irony broadly means saying one thing and meaning another' and is much to be commended, though this portentously self-important book would collapse at the faintest whiff of it.

It would be charitable to think that Bloom writes as slackly and cack-handedly as he does because he is out to attract the general reader. He is admirably intent on rescuing literature from the arcane rituals of US academia and restoring it to a wider audience. Even so, you cannot help suspecting that this rambling, platitudinous stuff is about the best he can now muster. As with all his work, a certain desperation runs beneath the heroism. Literature is the last surviving source of value in a degraded world, the only antidote to an academia obsessed with cross-dressing and multiculturalism.

Bloom is right to criticise US academia as sexually obsessed; but if literature is all that stands between us and suicide, then we might as well commit suicide.

Bloom comments after a reading of Browning's poem 'Childe Roland' that 'we have renewed and augmented the self, despite its despair, and its suicidal courting of failure'. Reading is a kind of confidence-boosting or spiritual muscle-building, a familiar enough American fetish from a man who claims to detest ideology.

>>6652320
I just do not care about what you have to say.
But consider the following:
This man works with words,
and yet he can not understand how his own words may or may not come across to others?
What is more likely?
I just do not care about what you have to say,
because I will not let fanboys decide the direction of any discussion.
It is my principle.

bloom is pleb as fuck, he's just another greedy rockstar academic who realizes the key to mega book sales is to engage in academia bashing, he's no better than some republican with an MBA telling hillbillies not to go to college

>>6652330
You are an assumptive idiot.

I dont have to be a fanboy of bloom to criticize you, you simpleton.

>This man works with words
>and yet he can not understand how his own words may or may not come across to others?

You assume young man is an insult for the many.

You assume that because "this man works with words", whatever the fuck that means, that he somehow has a talent for PR.

You assume his agenda must align with this talent of his.

Seriously. Stop and consider this.

Who the fuck could win this guessing game you are putting on Bloom? Who the fuck wouldnt step on a trap while attempting to "never offend" everyone in the world, a world supposedly where "young man" is considered an insult, for fucks sake

>>6652370
>You assume that because "this man works with words", whatever the fuck that means
It means he writes and reads for a living.

I find it cringeworthy.
Also I am drinking Squeez orange juice out of a wine glass while toasting to the screen.

>>6652379
>It means he writes and reads for a living.
So does the rest of the literate world.

>>6652384
And I may or may not point out any thing they say as cringeworthy when they say it and I get the impression it is.

>>6650516
At least he didn't call him "kid". "Young man" is, at least, condescension veiled respect.

>>6652387
Would you mind using the term "embarassing"

>>6652398
Calling someone under 30 'kid' is not condescending. They actually are kids.

>>6652411
I'd say around 24-26 is when you lose kid status.

>>6650648
we're trying to tear down that model, it's a 20 year process
i refuse to publish in non-OA journals, many others are like me... in my field it is perhaps more possible but it will reach everywhere within 20 years

>>6652422
All the 26 year olds I know act like kids

>>6652438
>tfw turning 27 this dec

I don't want to grow up.

>>6652438
Being 26 is a fucking strange feeling. For the first time you have the numerical proof you're closer to 30 than 20, but perhaps you still feel the fucking same as you did at 22.

>>6652453
And you will the same when your 30.. UNLESS YOU DO SOMETHING!

>>6652577
like your mom?

>tfw you just want to read books but all of this bickering about the downfall of academia and identity politics and degeneracy makes you want to give up

>>6652443
I've been 27 for a couple of months now.

Sometimes, I lie to people about my age, my background and my future plans. I tell them I'm going back to college to study artificial intelligence. I tell people what they want to hear, and what I wish could be the truth.

>>6652738
i wish i could go back to school to study ai, mainly computational linguistics, but my undergrad gpa was shit and i can't afford a vanity masters

>>6651681
>#just bourgeois things

>>6651681
i wasted years being a marxist, worst shit ever, that's not to say capitalism isn't fucked up, but marxism is stupid

>>6652686
Everyone here will say academia is doomed because they feel like saying it, and they think it cannot be said elsewhere. Doesn't necessarily mean it's true, doesn't mean you have to let it get to you.

Anti-social losers who grew up on 4chan love their online anarchy. They hate tone-policing. When you pick out the ones with humanities degrees, and put them together on the same board, the one place where they can call a visiting laurie penny a stupid cunt to her face and get away with it, you're going to see them use their precious freedom to whine about, ironically, the same things over and over again. Because it's a small group of people with nowhere to go.

>>6652884
I whine about this shit perfectly loudly on campus, mate.

>>6652890
I don't know if that's foolish or brave, depending on how loud, but at least it's better than sitting around on 4chan. Good luck tovarisch.

>>6652738
Yeah, I like to lie and say I'm 24 most of the time. Makes it less awkward when I say I'm dating a 22 year old... Not that 4 years is a big difference but some people get weirded out by it. It's true what >>6652453 said about feeling 22 when you're 26...

People ask me what my plans are and I make shit up like I'm starting an insect farm or going to law school or teacher college. Really I work a near full-time job installing invisible fencing and I have no actual plans beyond that.

>>6652884
It just makes it seem like a waste of time to study the classics when the current trend seems to be shitting on the canon and pulling everything apart. Poststructuralism and deconstruction make art seem as pointless as scientific reductionism does.

>>6650535
I feel that only people who havent step foot on a university think this kind of things.
There are things wich you cant learn efficiently on yourself, m8. And it wont come to you by only reading literature.

>>6652963
I'm more worried about how fucking lazy and easy it is to deconstruct everything and keep grasping for straws until people see what they want to see in a text (misogyny etc).

I'm also worried that the reason colleges keep the doors of the humanities open to just everyone is so they can keep the scam going and get easy money. They then put the money into STEM. You're paying for /sci/ to have their incredibly expensive labs. You're being scammed out of your time and money so it can be invested directly into other people having a future.

>>6653094
good. obviously they should be investing money into the departments that need and deserve it. and that sure as hell ain't humanities.

>>6653126
I guess? I just wish they didn't get this money by luring people to their doom.

>>6653094
also, if colleges got rid of literature departments they would have a lot less female students

>>6653156
It's sad, but very true.

13:33:33 checked

>>6651747

> I use words like nigger in my writing
> posts on /lit/

yeah y'all gonna go far

>>6653126
Why humanities doesnt deserve money? What is the criteria here?
Explain please.

>The interests of the literature professors run instead to identitarian themes that resound in departments. They declare their dispositions frankly. At Dartmouth College, for instance, apart from a few English professors casting themselves in traditional terms ("Latin, French, and English literature from England and northern France, eleventh to thirteenth centuries"), the majority, in their online bios, characterize their practices thusly:

>"I teach at the intersection of transnational Asian/ American studies, queer theory, and science fiction."

>"A scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, I examine how language affects our understanding of individuals, nations, and species. I examine transnationalism, animals, and the military draft to understand how differences become communicable."

>"I'm fascinated by the novel's relationship to law, particularly as the performance of political sovereignty enters into crisis in the transatlantic world of tri-coastal revolution and radical enlightenment. But my interests are, more generally, about questions of surface and depth, as literature negotiates the secrets that condition the emergence of the public sphere."

>>6651747
>I'm doing my part by being a straight white male author who uses words like nigger and faggot in my writing
So you are George R.R. Martín?
>The more she drank , the more she shat

>>6652920
>Not that 4 years is a big difference but some people get weirded out by it

The only people who would get "weirded out" by a 26 year old man dating a 22 year old woman are bitter hags.

The former Secretary of Labor and vocal progressivist Robert Reich clarified the opposition in a blog post that signals the future of the humanities under progressivist banners. The topic is charity and the tax code, which Reich deplores because

> a large portion of the charitable deductions now
> claimed by America's wealthy are for donations to
> culture palaces--operas, art museums, symphonies,
> and theaters--where they spend their leisure
> time hobnobbing with other wealthy benefactors.

The sneer you can hear in the last five words continues as he describes donations as

> investments in the lifestyles the wealthy already
> enjoy and want their children to have as well.
> Increasingly, being rich in America means not
> having to come across anyone who's not.

Given that "Poor New Yorkers rarely attend concerts at Lincoln Center," Reich concludes, let's end this deduction for "fancy museums" and devote the revenues to welfare, school lunches, and Head Start.

>>6652884
Oh boy, you have no idea what your talking about. Sweet job making sweeping generalizations into some grand theory though. I especially loved the part where you managed to never posit anything other than >academia is fine and if you disagree you're a loser

Here is the thing: hardly anyone in the developed world does real work anymore.

The real work is outsourced to the third world or simply not done. The work now done in the developed world is paper pushing that is *supposed* to be facilitating the real work, but often does not and instead becomes a competition with its own sets of rules that people abide by to compete for a share of the value that is being created somewhere else.

This is seen most acutely in businesses where most of the "work" is paper-pushing value transference, shifting around the value produced either by machines or people in the developing world.

Academia is like this but in some cases even worse, because now no value is being produced at all. Universally recognized valuable, important works of literature are simply no longer really being produced. There's nothing coming out for the commentators to comment on. All they can do is play insular word games with the word games of the past which maybe were actually based on valuable work. We're at least two generations removed from actual salient commentary on important work. Because the work is no longer even being produced.

Similar things are happening in the social sciences, of course. Post-modernism has abandoned the speculative optimism of modernist social science which was about examining ways to actively make society better -- hypothesizing, testing, evaluating new social structures, institutions and programs. The neutral, pessimistic stance toward active social change that characterizing post-modernism does not engage in this and against only plays insular word games with the commentary of the past and above all one competes with how well he can adhere to the establish "politically correct" guidelines that the social sciences are so in thrall to.

This is a larger phenomenon across the developed world. It has it's own flavor in academia but the exact that thing is happening in business, government, universal education, non-profits, everything.

>>6653316
also, the more value-less and paper pushing a job, it seems the more elite your academic credentials must be. if you need to do something actually productive like write an app, any geek with an accredited cs degree can probably get it done, but totally useless things like being an "administrative coordinator" or some other silly semi-managerial cak will require two masters with preference given to the candidate with the most expensive private undergrad degree

>>6653243
The work done in science departments leads to technological advancements and improved understanding of the natural world, which can sometimes lead to actual commercial products. The work done in humanities departments leads to nonsensical papers about identity politics.

>>6653355
If the work is less valuable it is probably easier, so richer people will want to do it. To justify paying themselves tons of money for easier work, they have to create the illusion that it is difficult and requires absurd qualifications and abilities so they erect even larger barriers to entry and require more and more credentials. So what we end up with is the easiest, least valuable work being the hardest to get and paying the most.

To some degree this has, of course, always been the case but in recent decades in the west it's been taken to a new extreme because there simply *isn't* much more valuable work to do.

Of course, finance is the ultimate point of reference for this. There is overwhelming evidence that a large financial sector is a drag on the economy in just about every way. But these people are paid the most because they shift around the value created by other people, increasingly created in the developing world or by technology. Value flows into the developed world that is produced elsewhere and people compete over who can plunder the most of it through what is a essentially a ritualized game. Academia is similar.

>>6650516
calm down, young man

>>6650430
i completely agree.

>>6653384
To continue with academia, think of academics as tradesmen like plumbers or electricians. Plumbers and electricians are supposed to be making their living by adding value to buildings. For academia, these buildings are new works of art, new social policy -- things they should be adding valuable, insightful commentary and analysis to. But what if no one built buildings anymore? What would the electrician do? Maybe once and a while a wire would go bad in the wall or a transformer would exploded, and the electrician would have something to do. But this is rare. His bread a butter must be servicing new buildings, which are no longer being built. If the electricians had enough social power, they would perhaps start building light switches in the middle of no where that no one asked for and that benefited no one, attaching lights to them and fitting out the wires and demanding to be paid for it. For academia, the buildings, the works of art, are no longer being made. The light switch in the middle of no where that no one wanted and it's helping anyone and the electricians are demanding to be paid for is post-modernism.

>>6650648
>pay taxes for publicly funded research
>results of said research are locked behind a ludicrous paywall
I never understood this.

>>6653372
>The work done in science departments leads to technological advancements
Certainly. But the human doesnt submit merely to technological advancements.

>and improved understanding of the natural world
But all sciences focuse on understanding the world, including humanities. So that is not argument.
Also, what is "natural world"?, and why call it like that?

>which can sometimes lead to actual commercial products.
But that is not the purpose of the sciences, that is something you do with their help. Also, the human doesnt reduce to consumption of products.

>The work done in humanities departments leads to nonsensical papers about identity politics.
That is a lie. A work about Husserl's trascendental phenomenology will not be about identity politics unless that is your subject.

>>6653408
The paywall is to pay for the establishment, not the actual research itself.

That doesn't make it any better, obviously, but dem's the brakes.

Young man.

>>6653426

>Certainly. But the human doesnt submit merely to technological advancements.
What does that have to do with anything?

>But all sciences focuse on understanding the world, including humanities. So that is not argument.
Also, what is "natural world"?, and why call it like that?
I was hoping to avoid "hurr muh Scientism" replies from Christposters by saying that science specifically investigates the natural world.

>But that is not the purpose of the sciences, that is something you do with their help. Also, the human doesnt reduce to consumption of products.
My point is that governments or companies have a much better reason to fund science departments than humanities departments because they produce new technologies, new scientific theories, or confirmation of scientific theories. You can at least quantify the extent to which scientific theories correspond to measurements.

The same can't be said for "theories" in humanities. Although sometimes interesting, they are not the best use of taxpayer funds.

'Young man' is a coded reference to a classic love poem by Housman and thus an implicit admission of Professor Bloom's repressed homosexuality.

>Some lads there are, 'tis shame to say,
>That only court to thieve,
>And once they bear the bloom away
>'Tis little enough they leave.
>Then keep your heart for men like me
>And safe from trustless chaps.
>My love is true and all for you.
>'Perhaps, young man, perhaps.'

>>6653463
I would say people say "Natural World" to distinguish science from society and philosophy, both of which tend to operate very diffrently than the natural order of things. You can say that philosophy is the study of how the natural world should operate, but should and does are two very different things sometimes, unfortunately.

>>6653475
I think science may not have the tools to investigate "society", though it probably will at some point in the future.

I think philosophy is either a branch of logic or dosen't study much of anything at all, and is a more artful way of stating opinions.

It is not like pure mathematics where there is a mostly-agreed-upon set of assumptions and results are derived from there. As far as I know, philosophers can't even agree on whether anything exists at all.

>>6653463
>What does that have to do with anything?
You mentioned technological advancement.

>science specifically investigates the natural world.
But, what is the "natural world"? And wich science is that? Because all sciences refer to the world.

>My point is that governments or companies have a much better reason to fund science departments than humanities departments because they produce new technologies, new scientific theories, or confirmation of scientific theories.
I agree with you. But I dont bash on humanities because they dont do what I personally want.

>The same can't be said for "theories" in humanities.
Why "theories"? The term wasnt even used for physics originally, for example. So, theories dont have to refer to one method of research (like in physics). Also, the fact that they dont help you to make a car doesnt makes them less knowledge.

>they are not the best use of taxpayer funds.
It is true in a certain state of things. If the country is poor they wont want to study literature. But let the people study whatever they want if they have the resources.

>>6653384
I have had three jobs — a manager of the marketing department at a small nonprofit engineering company, a production assistant at an advertising agency start-up, and a waiter at a low-end Italian restaurant. From this experience, I can say that the value of work is not based on the difficult of your labor but the quality of your ideas. By far the most stressful and demanding of these three jobs was the waiting position.

The waiting position offered no opportunities to have or voice ideas. Regardless of my education or experience, my labor was completely undifferentiated from my coworkers' labor. I did a job that required only my presence and nothing else, and though it was the least demanding, I was the least compensated for this labor. Meanwhile, as a production assistant at an advertising agency, I certainly did not have the creative input of a director, but I could occasionally contribute to the final product through my ideas. How the lights were positioned, how the camera was tuned, how the talent was mic'd. Though the majority of my work was moving gear back and forth, I was compensated better because of the importance of my ideas. Finally, as the manager of a marketing department at a nonprofit, my day-to-day work required almost no labor at all, but I was seen as having ideas nobody else could have. How we should brand ourselves, where we should market to our target audience, what company objectives must be reached by when and why. I was sitting in a chair for the majority of the time analyzing my resources and just thinking.

Therefore, I say that the real disparity is not between "easy" or "hard," but rather just the amount of ideas you must have. For whatever reason, actual labor is incredibly unimportant because everyone is viewed as capable of labor, but ideas are sacred because everyone is viewed as being incapable of having good ideas.

>>6653403
Your analogy is fitting, but the absent-minded prose weakens it.

>>6653456
>pay taxes for publicly funded universities
>research is still locked behind a ludicrous paywall
PLS

>>6653542
How much value is created in advertising for a nonprofit engineering company? In theory you're facilitating the engineers' ability to create value. Hopefully in your job you were able to do this but in a lot of nonprofit jobs this isn't how it turns out. Look at some of the recent debacles with the Red Cross running big advertising campaigns, taking tons of cash and hardly getting anything actually done. Tons of nonprofits do plenty of value transference -- advertising, promoting, fundraising, holding meetings, setting up offices -- but little relative value creation (doing the actual task they're supposed to do). Advertising creates scarcely any value.

>>6653642
>Advertising creates scarcely any value.

For-profit advertising that is. Marketing for a nonprofit can plausibly create value because they don't sell a product to consumers, they ask for money to complete a task. The real value is of course the task being completed, the marketing should be facilitating this.

>>6653642
Working as a production assistant at an advertising firm, the producer once told me that he enjoys his job because of all the good in the world he does because of it. Intrigued, I asked him what he meant by that. He said that because of the work he does in our commercials and advertising campaigns, he directly contributes to the careers of our clients who hire us. Their businesses can grow, their employees can get raises, and everyone's happier all around.

Silently, I questioned how much good was actually being accomplished in these advertisements. At best, what I saw was some money trading hands to produce thirty seconds commercials that would go on the air for a couple weeks to a month max. Sure, our commercials had some damn good production value and our clients found they profited enough from them to continue hiring us, but we weren't saving lives, providing clothes to homeless children, or feeding the chronically hungry. We were totally occupied in our camera games, never really making anything of any value. At best, random people wasting their lives in front of the TV would be amused by our cleverness and spurned to spend a couple dollars here or there. In my opinion, the most humanistic thing we did in our office was recycle.

As a manager at the nonprofit, I definitely felt less pressure to run highly successful campaigns than I think I would have at a for-profit company. But at the end of the day, I still don't feel like all my hours and even years there really did anything good for anyone. A few more people spent their money on our products instead of our competitors'. Woohoo?

>>6650890
>Village people
Sodomite detected. Do you think Bloom was trying to recruit the interviewer into his "alternative lifestyle"?
>>6651883
>All undergrads should invent drastic new critical approaches for every term paper with no dialectic discourse between existing approaches
hmmmm
>>6653385
>>6652326
>>6652411
Keep sucking wrinkly old circumcised schlong.

>>6650430
>politicizing literature
>politicizing
>literature was ever apolitical

>>6652278
>Well, anon, if you don't like my contrived biblical references, you don't understand The Classics™ and probably believe in identity politics and feminist literary criticism

>>6653773
that's not what they mean

>>6653792
not an accurate portrayal of bloom, and his reference is not that contrived if you've actually read the bible

>>6652330

You are reading far too much into a subtext that simply isn't there.