/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21881063]

> Harold Bloom called the book “just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent […] Stephen King is Cervantes compared with Wallace.”
Uh, Wallacesisters…our response?

[Anonymous No.21881080]

>>21881063
don't care

[Anonymous No.21881086]

>critic
Ok
Why dont you try writing something better then

[Anonymous No.21881089]

Aren't they both dead? Who cares?

[Anonymous No.21881096]

>>21881086
That's not how critisiscm works idiot. Have you ever seen a car you didn't like? Try building your own car then! See?

[Anonymous No.21881101]

Bloom was an excellent critic and I will forever be thankful that he existed. He is one who introduced so many to classics that otherwise they would never have read. He defended the canon against shitty reactionary politics that were just starting to take root in higher education. He was a tireless advocate for pushing oneself intellectually.

He was straight braindead on Wallace though.

[Anonymous No.21881107]

>>21881080
>>21881089
Because IJ is the greatest novel written since Gravity’s Rainbow and he insulted it[1].

[1] Rather excessively, i/m/o.

[Anonymous No.21881122]

Bloom can't handle the bantz.

[Anonymous No.21881126]

>>21881101
Thankful to who?

[Anonymousn No.21881133]

>>21881063
The whole content of the quote 'IJ is bad', so the range of responses is limited to (1) 'IJ is good, actually' or (2) 'Yes, Harold Bloom, you're right'.

Anything beyond that would stop being a response and instead be an unrelated point about Infinite Jest.

[Anonymous No.21881136]

>>21881096
>Have you ever seen a car you didn't like?
Yes but since I know nothing about building cars, I never bothered to voice my opinions on it.

[Anonymous No.21881139]

>>21881126
God you dumb cunt.

[Anonymous No.21881145]

>>21881126

To the same deity Bloom himself worshipped, naturally.

[Anonymous No.21881214]

>>21881063
Critics tend to have a twisted psychology since they secretly would prefer to be authors rather than commentators. Bloom himself I think tried to write a novel at some point.

[Anonymous No.21881263]

>>21881214
So therefore no-one should criticise anything unless they themselves are an author or poet? But then wouldn’t being an author/poet mean that you are more subject to envy and competitiveness with your contemporaries? We need some people to be critics, it’s very important to know what is good literature for our general edification. And some critics can do this without necessarily being envious of the author’s role, if they are conscious of the critic’s significance.

[Anonymous No.21881323]

>>21881063
>These academics' arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitalia-doodles on their college-rule note-pads, reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit[366]
>[366] Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom's turgid studies of artistic 'influenza'—though it's unclear how either Flood- or dead-ancestor discussions have any connection to S. Peterson's low-budget classic 'The Cage', which is mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around, other than the fact that J.O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could; maybe the 'disjunction' or 'disconnection' between the screen's film and Ph.D.'s scholastic discussion of art is part of the point.[a]
>[a] (Which of course assumes there's a point.)

[Anonymous No.21881325]

>>21881214
>>21881263
>aren't most critics simply failed authors?
>yes, but so are most authors
-- some guy

[Anonymous No.21881357]

Not to speak ill of the dead, but Harold Bloom is a pathological liar obsessed in the most literal sense of the word with Shakespeare, specifically Hamlet. So much so that he’d kvetch aggressively over writers like Eliot when they said Hamlet sucked. Or spend his entire introduction to Don Quixote speaking about Hamlet (mentions it inside of two sentences). People applaud him for championing the Western Canon, as if it was ever really in danger to anything. As if Shakespeare would actually be forgotten without Bloom. He was obsessed with cringetastic things like Gnosticism, hated the Gospel (THE most important text IN the Western Canon). He claimed he could read 1000 pages an hour — 1 page in 3 seconds — and had hundreds of full length novels memorized.

[Anonymous No.21881364]

It amazes me that the most prominent literary critic of the last fifty years actively dissuaded people from reading possibly the greatest writer of the last fifty years while he was still alive and working. It’s unforgivable

[Anonymous No.21881371]

the silence became unendurable

[Anonymous No.21881415]

AFAIK the /lit/ scholarship on this guy is that
- he had a weird NPR interview, https://www.npr.org/2015/08/14/432161732/david-foster-wallace-the-fresh-air-interview
- the standard for getting interviewed by Terry Gross is held by...Gene Simmons... https://freshairarchive.org/segments/gene-simmons
I think he had a brain disorder...right around the 1990's, people were discovering the link between marijuana and the endocannabinoid system.
Essentially he's getting lost in vampire shit. His critics aren't wrong, but they aren't able to actually figure out that the problem is essentially Buddhist.
The problem is that you have to be a Buddhist to figure out that the problem is essentially Buddhist in nature, or Buddhist-Taoist or Buddhist-Taoist-Zen-Chan-Mani-Zoroaster-Monotheist.
Monotheism is a logical mess...it's a tar baby, a briar patch. It's real vampire stuff.
The West doesn't have a "thicket of views" approach. There is no machete in the West. Jesus didn't say, "these men have many abstract views, and they get lost in them." Jesus decided that violently escalating the situation would be a good idea.
Of course, the whole point of violently escalating the situation was that Rome annexed Egypt, and Jesus was doing the needful.

[Anonymous No.21881416]

>>21881325
This is a line from The Critic

[Anonymous No.21881438]

>>21881357
>He was obsessed with cringetastic things like Gnosticism, hated the Gospel
Goddamn, I guess a broken clock is right twice a lifetime.

[Anonymous No.21881441]

>>21881415
Evil is so sniveling and petty. It always points us to Jesus, and it thinks it can talk us into agreeing with its opinions on Him

[Anonymous No.21881451]

>>21881136
Actual retard
>"but you've never done anything better!"
Has always been a cope by seething fags who got angry that their work or a work they liked got rightfully shat on

[Anonymous No.21881459]

>>21881441
So the scholarship on Jesus is that
- Rome (a non-kingdom) annexed Egypt (a kingdom) in 30 BC
and the whole point is that all of these Egyptian whores need a father figure
that's it
the whole point of Jesus is to babysit these whores
and these hoes are really fuckin' smart
I mean, they're logical geniuses
they run circles around these gay Greek philosophers
so Jesus has to whip out the celestial hierarchy to keep these sluts dancing
because the johns keep coming
But Rome ain't got no King, baby!!!!
so they make Jesus the King of Babysitting Genius Egyptian Sluts with I.Q.'s so high u just gotta rip their fuckin' necks off...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-FSLuVB33U

[Anonymous No.21881467]

Bloom has been a recurring figure on /lit/ for years and I've never seen people quote anything insightful or interesting from him

[Anonymous No.21881481]

>>21881459
So, the question then becomes: what was the effect of the Roman Republic on the Egyptian prostitution economy, given that the Roman Republic didn't support the same level of integration of the prostitution economy with power?
Was the Roman political innovation of the Republic effective a war of economic attrition against Egypt?
Did the political innovation of the Republic give Rome the ability--by way of developing a novel economic relationship whereby Rome economically dominated Egypt---to eventually annex Egypt?

[Anonymous No.21881495]

I CAN'T THINK
I CAN'T WRITE
ONLY THING ABOUT ME
IS MY POOR EYESIGHT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGI2d31M7Ns

[Anonymous No.21881496]

>>21881415
Vampire shit?

[Anonymous No.21881499]

>>21881364
It's frankly enough to question his overall judgment. What was the last American novel that Bloom liked, anyway? Blood Meridian? Some Joshua Cohen joint?

[Anonymous No.21881502]

>>21881496
This would be pre-Buddhist thought. Having the problems that precipitate Buddhist approach, i.e. saṃvega.

[Anonymous No.21881504]

>>21881499
I know he liked Underworld, so at least until then.

[Anonymous No.21881507]

>>21881499
No way. Bloom is right. However, Bloom should go further and question the role of art to "reflect" culture or whatever, to act in a merely passive way, given what we know about culture and influence. So, just because it's awful and it reflects something awful, that's no excuse to be apathetic or passive. The role of culture to influence still persists, so it demands responsible exercise of power. We can't just fall back on some idealistic role where we can feed our inputs into some giant culture machine and everything will turn out okay. We aren't cultural tourists, we're driving the damn bus.

[Anonymous No.21881515]

>>21881063
Harold Bloom is a fat, talentless bastard and he's dead

[Anonymous No.21881556]

Based Bloom.

[Anonymous No.21881561]

It's a good book and some fat jew slob doesn't change my assessment

[Anonymous No.21881571]

>>21881357
He hated Eliot because he was a Christian moralist who rightly identified that Jews aren't the world's greatest people and are, in fact, the opposite of that. Bloom was a big sloppy kike and couldn't handle it

[Anonymous No.21881574]

>>21881364
Dfw sucks

[Anonymous No.21881584]

>>21881467
Because he never said anything insightful or interesting lol. I make this same point in every Bloom thread. His criticism just isn't remarkable in any way and he has almost nothing to say. Better output than Wallace anyway though. Sort of a literary retarded cripple fight.

[Anonymous No.21881657]

>>21881459
Yikes and cringe. Pray for yourself

[Anonymous No.21881672]

>>21881574
"That sucking sound is your blood leaving your veins and entering my esophagus."
"I'm going to give you the choice that I never had..."

[Anonymous No.21881699]

>>21881574
>Dfw sucks
>reddit meme
checks out

[Anonymous No.21882251]

>>21881699
I don't think 911 conspiracies are reddit.

[Anonymous No.21882571]

>>21881263
>>21881451
It's true. The only effective form of literature criticism is to become an author yourself.
Take that car example, for instance. If you say you don't like a car, it's because you have an idea of what a "proper car" is supposed to be. Unless you're a car mechanic, however, you do not know the limits of what a "proper car" entails, aside from a few select barriers. For example, you would have to be extremely uninformed in order to decide that you don't like a car because it cannot fly. That's on the outer limit of uninformation. As you get closer to the idea of a "proper car", however, more experience and technical knowledge is required, and past a certain threshold that knowledge can only come from having worked on a car yourself.
Observe again "literature critics", among whom there are none that do not view what they read as flying cars.

[Anonymous No.21882642]

I'm not American and I thought David Foster Wallace was know for his essays. I remember a lecturer here praising him for writing about a rural fair.

[Anonymous No.21882676]

I enjoyed reading IJ. There are some cool ideas and the various digressions are amusing and interesting. The characters are OK. The tennis academy has a weird vibe which I really liked. The near-future scifi elements are cool. The diverging plotlines are neat. HOWEVER it does not justify its length. It just doesn't.

[Anonymous No.21882837]

>>21881459

[Anonymous No.21882840]

>>21881699
>this NEEDS to be about reddit

[Anonymous No.21882937]

>>21882840
>quick post a frog so they know I'm a channer!

[Anonymous No.21882947]

>>21882937
They don't have frogs over there?

[Anonymous No.21882950]

>>21881451
t. cant write for shit

[Anonymous No.21882992]

>>21882937
you can't post inline frogs on reddit
that's why it sucks

[Anonymous No.21883074]

>>21881063
people that read dfw novels outside the context of his other works and maybe even his personal life have missed the point. dfws essays make his novels seem amateurish on their own but having them as a foundation from which to read his novels provides a greater value

[Anonymous No.21883174]

>>21881467
I haven't read a lot of Bloom but I'm working through Shakespeare's complete plays and reading Bloom's essays (one on each play in his big book on Shakespeare) regularly makes me appreciate the plays more or think about them in ways I otherwise wouldn't have. He's, at the very least, a very good Shakespeare critic--probably up there with the Johnson, Hazlitt, etc.

E.g. I think he's the only critic who's analysis of Measure for Measure makes sense to me. I've read the play in several editions, read the classical critics, read lots of introductions to the work; Bloom just gets it. And, unlike lots of other Shakespeare commentators, Bloom actually supports his analysis by quoting and analyzing text directly.

[Anonymous No.21883191]

>>21882571
Literary work is to Author as Car is to Car manufacturer. not Mechanic. Mechanic is to Car as Editor is to Literary work. dummy.

Also, just because mechanics have technical knowledge about the operation of a car doesn't mean they have good taste in cars. Top Gear is hosted by a bunch of not-mechanics. If your analogy, worked, the best literary critics would be linguists or copyeditors.

[Anonymous No.21883216]

>>21881096
recently i’ve really been mulling over the notion that in order to qualify an opinion as valid criticism you need to have had previous demonstrable expertise in the field you’re critiquing because ultimately only this criterion can indisputably lend legitimacy to any prescriptive claim, otherwise it is just opinion or, tending toward academia, analysis, or tending toward the political, ideology.