/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11475992]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeIvt9CDlI
>If you don't learn how to read you don't learn how to think, if you don't learn how to think you get Donald Trump

Is he right?

[Anonymous No.11475997]

>>11475992
basically yea

[Anonymous No.11476008]

>>11475992
>Is he right?
Clearly. That's not exactly a controversial statement.

[Anonymous No.11476011]

No. But it's very typical to say that people who disagree with you are just not 'thinking'.

[Anonymous No.11476018]

>>11475992
>fascism comes from ignorance and stupidity

can you imagine dedicating your entire life to books and when you're almost 90 you still believe banalities like 'trump is hitler'

[Anonymous No.11476021]

No lol
This is the same guy who thought the Bush administration was planning a coup d'etat. Our writers are children when it comes to politics and Bloom is living proof that literary knowledge teaches you nothing about politics.

[Anonymous No.11476030]

What was the literacy rate during Athenian democracy?

[Anonymous No.11476031]

But Harold Bloom doesn't know how to read, as evidence by his interpretations of Cervantes comparing him to Shakespeare (LMFAO) and even Montaigne (LMFAAAAOOOOOOOO)

[Anonymous No.11476037]

>>11475992
Bloom was always cringe when he talks about politics. A grandmaster of literature who can make hundreds of pages of mystic ramblings on the nature of artist and their insight to the human condition, but he's still an openly trite new york liberal who thinks guns are evil.
He did say he disliked Hillary though and expected her to lose.

[Anonymous No.11476047]

>>11476037
>A grandmaster of literature
no

[Anonymous No.11476048]

>>11475992
>his worldview

[Anonymous No.11476056]

>if you don't read you'll never attain to the highest levels of intellectual power
>"drumpf dumb dumb big fascist bad guy u no agree u stupids"
A sage for the ages

[Anonymous No.11476063]

>drumpf

wow what an insight

[Anonymous No.11476065]

>>11476047
There is no known reader in the world today more seasoned than him.

[Anonymous No.11476074]

>>11476056
Maybe rather than assuming all the learned people of the world are wrong about Trump you could have the humility to think they might know a lot that you don't.

[Anonymous No.11476082]

>>11476074
>Maybe rather than assuming all the learned people of the world are wrong about Trump you could have the humility to think they might know a lot that you don't.
Dubya was planning a coup, you have to believe this because Bloom said so

[Anonymous No.11476090]

>>11476065
Maybe in the anglo world
And if he's the best the anglo world has to offer in terms of literary critc, then you're in the dark age

[Anonymous No.11476091]

>disliking people for disliking drumpf
You guys are just as banal and cringe as the people you call banal and cringe

[Anonymous No.11476097]

>>11476091
>you're what you accuse others of being!
How banal and cringe

[Anonymous No.11476098]

I really don't get why these people seem to not get Blumpfff, he's not exactly a complicated guy.

[Anonymous No.11476105]

>>11476074
What are 'all the learned people of the world' and why are they qualified to make definitive judgements on a complex American socio-political phenomenon?

[Anonymous No.11476110]

When did *everything* start becoming about trump? Why did it?
I feel like I've become schizphrenic over the past few months.
Has life been feeling exceptionally uncanny for anyone else lately?
This goes beyond absurdity.

[Anonymous No.11476115]

>>11476018
Couldn’t you argue his canon is fascist? In fact haven’t people started to argue this this? “Muh dead white men”.
Does Bloom see the disconnect?

[Anonymous No.11476131]

>>11475992
>that interviewer munching cookies while harold talks about how all his poet friends are dead
darkly funny lmao

[Anonymous No.11476139]

>>11476115
Bloom’s canon includes plenty of non-whites

[Anonymous No.11476160]

>>11476105
You don't need to understand all the nuances of the American socio-political situation to realize that Trump is a blight on the country. Even ignoring his poor diplomatic skills and general inconsistency, many of his actions have already compounded the cronyist problem in America. You think during a time when corporations have more control than ever before, when wealth inequality is approaching that of the gilded age, lowering the corporate tax rate is a good idea?

[Anonymous No.11476170]

First of all, I do not like Trump, but at the same time I do not see him as a fascist. If we were to look for a villain in America a much better candidate would be Henry Kissinger (this one a real war criminal).

But to the point: Harold Bloom is not a good critic of literature. I just needed to said before that I am not a Trump fan-boy to make it clear that critic of Bloom has nothing to do with his political views.

Is there a merit in Harold Bloom’s carrear? Yes: he read a lot during his life (more than anyone I know of), worked very hard and did everything he could to get to know as much literary masterpieces as possible.

But this, however, does not save him, nor does it endow him with any grain of artistic sensibility. He rarely mades any comment about the style of the authors he addresses, about the techniques and details of the works in question: never shows what makes them masterpieces. He is obsessed with Shakespeare, but he hardly ever analyzes with the rigor of an anatomist the aspect that is, perhaps, the most important in Shakespeare's work: his language.

Then we get so many of his generalizations and pseudo-theories, his endless grunting about Kabbalah, his eternal murmuring on Gnosticism. Not to mention his ridiculous semi-divine, creed-like critical fantasies, like Shakespeare's invention of the human (and the simple and annoying fact that, no matter which writer Bloom is discussing, he will speak more about Shakespeare than about the author in question).

His artistic evaluations are often an endless mention of other works, of other authors, of combats between one author and another author, of exaggerated and sensationalist assertions devoid of any proof.

To see how flawed Bloom is just compare him to another critic who is not himself a writer: James Wood (comparing him to another critic who has verbal sensibility, like Nabokov, would be unfair).

I really do not understand how this man got the respect and stature he now enjoys. (His criticisms of the erosion and decay of the departments of human sciences are quite true, though).

[Anonymous No.11476176]

>>11475992
Jesus christ he's on his last legs.

[Anonymous No.11476188]

>>11476160
>ou don't need to understand all the nuances of the American socio-political situation
Or any of them, apparently.
Imagine getting your political views from a book reviewer

[Anonymous No.11476190]

>>11476160

[Anonymous No.11476211]

>>11476160
Other than being a source of anger to status quo fags in the capital and media for not playing the public part very well he's done no different than any other candidate. His faults are overblown as something especially bad because he represents an opposition to the wider establishment, and that he got success as the president for this in the first place is a much more complex issue than ignorance and fascism.

[Anonymous No.11476265]

>>11476170
Mostly he inspires passion in the texts he reads, more-so than any dry analytical surveyor. He certainly has his own analytical justifications for his theories and comparisons too, which you'll see in most his works other than The Western Canon.