/lit/ - Literature

[sandwiches No.2557295]

> your visage when you're reading a Harold Bloom edited anthology of essays on one of your favourite books and in the introduction Harold Bloom knocks it for being "impermanent" and not rising above some oedipal rivalry of authors of which Bloom is sole judge

> your visage when he keeps insisting that anxiety influence isn't Oedipal

I bet if Shakespeare was alive he'd slap his face and tell him something like "Hamlet wasn't that good, bro"

[Anonymous No.2557311]

Harold Bloom is a staunch Romanticist and as such his opinions on the topic of literature are meaningless.

[Deep&Edgy !UfFKGtFx2M!!/0aWHODYBc0 No.2557314]

sandwiches confirmed for filthy resentment-schooler

[sandwiches No.2557322]

>>2557314

[Anonymous No.2557339]

I remember reading something that said that Shakespeare apparently thought The Tempest was better than Hamlet.

I'm not sure if it was the Tempest or not, but something that had a T in it.

[Anonymous No.2557340]

>>2557339
Titus Andronicus, dur

[Anonymous No.2557347]

which book was it. i love it when he does that. i'll post the first paragraph of it if i can find it

[Anonymous No.2557349]

>>2557340
lol naw, maybe it was Timon of Athens or A Winter's Tale? I can;t remember and I'm pretty sure I read it in one of Bloom's books and then he dismissed the claim outright.

[Anonymous No.2557350]

i have like 350 of those things on my hard drive lol

[sandwiches No.2557354]

>>2557350
Bloom anthologies? Do you want to upload some of them? Google books has a lot of them but they limit the amount you can 'preview.'

He's always been best as an editor. 90% of the stuff he spouts as a critic is uninteresting, rephrasing something someone else said, and unnecessarily long. I read in an interview that he rarely edits what he writes. Gramps just loves to rant, I guess.

[Anonymous No.2557361]

>>2557354
i'll upload all of them. compressing atm

[Anonymous No.2557362]

>implying Bloom is the sole judge
>implying Bloom implies that he's the sole judge

[Anonymous No.2557366]

>>2557361
uploading part 1 of 2

[Anonymous No.2557370]

>>2557295
I thought Hamlet was pretty good.
I'll have to reread it now with all the internet h8rs in mind.

[sandwiches No.2557373]

>>2557370
Naw, it's great. Not hating, just Bloom gets annoying sometimes with all this

Shakespeare is richer

Hamlet is richer

It's not always the most enlightening stuff.

[Anonymous No.2557379]

Bloom's Critical Anthologies part 1

http://www.mediafire.com/?ohn88dqmuqurfoi

currently uploading part 2

[sandwiches No.2557388]

>>2557379
Glorious, but it's set to private?

[Anonymous No.2557391]

>>2557388
sorry. it's fixed.

[sandwiches No.2557397]

>>2557391
Amazing, many thanks. Where did you get the electronic copies, if I may ask?

[Anonymous No.2557400]

>>2557397
library.nu lol

[Anonymous No.2557405]

Bloom's Critical Anthologies part 2

http://www.mediafire.com/?ubycuvy4l8dabt0

you'll notice some of the folders are empty. this is because I planned on adding things to them, but no longer could after the death of library.nu. if anyone happens to come across those files, fill up the folders with them, and reupload!! thanks

[sandwiches No.2557419]

>>2557405
I might.

Been considering scanning some sexy books from my library and uploading them but I don't know much about formatting. I think they'd all be .pdfs.

I think I'll test it out for a glorious Sebald anthology (in colour).

[Anonymous No.2557425]

>>2557419
i think most of these were digitized by the publisher, which would explain why none of them seem to be a scan.

[Anonymous No.2557625]

>>2557405
>>2557379
Thanks so much. I only grabbed a few of these off nu before it went down.

Anyone have any of the Bloom's Major Literary Characters? I mainly want Falstaff and Ahab.

[Anonymous No.2557628]

>>2557625
only one I remember finding is Holden Caulfield. I guess you aren't too interested in him

[Anonymous No.2557634]

Bloom is a parody of modern literary critics

[Anonymous No.2558473]

I like him. His excessive passion is absolutely infectious. Every time I read something by him or hear him talk, he makes me want to go read some Shakespeare. If anyone really got me on the right track with respect to literature, it has to be Harold Bloom.

[Anonymous No.2559569]

>>2557634
He's one of the final representatives of a dying breed of literary critics. <--- what Harold Bloom actually believes lol

[Anonymous No.2559574]

>>2557295

>Literary critic
>File that under who gives a fuck.

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559608]

He's kinda carved out a niche for himself where he's impotent to do anything critical but say how much he likes something. Which is why it's important to him to constantly remind the reader that Shakespeare is better than anything they might care to enjoy. He has a vague point about the so-called 'Schools of Resentment' but I think he has never endeavoured to fully get to grips with their agenda and their methodology, so his criticism has little of real relevance. I mean the work of say Edward Said although virulently opposed to the racist mechanisms of colonialism as espoused in ethnographic/geographical material published in the Imperial age, is not out to devalue the canon of British literature from the time, just to add to our understanding (c.f. his essay on Mansfield Park (? I think) where it's more about fine-tuning any theory on ideology in Austen than to set about criticizing any racist elements the work has).

[Anonymous No.2559610]

>>2559608
pretty sure bloom likes some of said's criticism, and even included an essay from him in an anthology

[Deep&Edgy !UfFKGtFx2M!!/0aWHODYBc0 No.2559614]

>>2559608
>he's impotent to do anything critical but say how much he likes something
If you were to find the greatest critic in the world, that would still be all that he would be doing. That is a genuine critic's job: to tell you how much he likes something and why. That is why, concerning literary criticism, at any point in time I would infinitely prefer to read Bloom over Said, Chakavakavak Spivak, Derrida, and any other number of people who simply do not have the absolute and total love of literary writing first and foremost among their preoccupations.

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559615]

>>2559610
Well, I picked what seemed to be a strong example of a 'School of Resentment' luminary. Maybe you can think of a better one. Terry Eagleton?

the point is, he should have engaged more thoroughly with these perspectives.

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559624]

>>2559614
Well, it's a touchy subject, particularly now people enjoy having a certain autonomy over what they want to read/enjoy, it being one of the few true freedoms left to the feckless western world. Some even get quite angry about academics and their proclivity to praise stuff they don't have the means as yet to access; it's another perspective that has a vague point once you got round the sickening arrogance it originates in. Of course, evaluation should have some academic import, but in part because formalist and post-structuralist accounts have more grounds for discourse and because evaluative accounts have so few grounds to them that they end up adding nugatory value to any discourse, is a reasonable decision the academic world has made as a whole to leave Bloom behind.

Reading his guide for White Noise, it feels kinda ridiculous that he makes a big point of saying how much better Underworld is, and the same for his guide on Death of a Salesman, how much worse a writer O'Neill is than Miller, but how mediocre Miller is anyway.

[Anonymous No.2559631]

>>2559615
I'm just saying. It surprised me too, and that's the only reason I remember it

[Deep&Edgy !UfFKGtFx2M!!/0aWHODYBc0 No.2559632]

>>2559624
>evaluative accounts have so few grounds
What grounds are you looking for exactly? A cosmic boogey man's say-so? An empirically verifiable proposition? help me out here

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559633]

>>2559631
don't worry, I had chosen a bad example. Said's kinda respectable versus say Spivak

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559638]

>>2559632
Well, with formalism, you have the text itself, and time-tested conventions of literary devices

With post-structuralism, you have a reasonable idea of how to conceptualize the ideological framework that informs a work, at least in schematic.

With evaluation, you're almost going with the best rhetorician, although it's not quite that bad.

[Anonymous No.2559646]

Putting literature in a socio-historical framework is only interesting if it's a new insight.

The lit theory/marxist pharisees want to deconstruct the power dynamics in a work of literature because it's much easier to criticize ad infinitum without affirming any principle(s) whatsoever.

>Well, it's a touchy subject, particularly now people enjoy having a certain autonomy over what they want to read/enjoy, it being one of the few true freedoms left to the feckless western world.

I'm not sure what you mean by any of this. You could do far worse than the regimented, bureaucratic lifestyle westerners live. I doubt a flabby old man telling us what to like is going to perturb anyone in the same way the predominant quasi-ideology of humanities departments would. Jackass or no, Harold Bloom likes what he likes -- what an atrocity! Ignore him if it's that bothersome, damn.

[Anonymous No.2559651]

tl;dr glib dismissal vs. insipid erudition: which style of intellectual bluster will win? next time on literary balls z *farts*

[Deep&Edgy !UfFKGtFx2M!!/0aWHODYBc0 No.2559655]

>>2559638
>although it's not quite that bad
No, it isn't. Firstly, a good deal of critics (I am not talking about reviewers) have backgrounds in theoretical traditions like Formalism and 'post-structuralism', indeed, I suspect you will be a bit hard pressed to find any academic critic who has not been parsed into some tradition or other. For critics who aren't well entrenched in academia, like say some of the people I look at on the New Criterion, 'rhetoric' is hardly ever an issue in looking at their work. That is because people tend to learn literature through traditions. If you have done english literature in high school you will more than likely have learnt a sort of rough and ready style of New Criticism. The more obvious point is that any trained critic can see through a rhetorical evaluation for what it really is, so unless you are talking specifically about people who don't know anything about how to analyse literature, it isn't rhetoric, it is just "bad evaluation". So yes, literary evaluation has its share of charlatans, much like anything else.

[Deep&Edgy !UfFKGtFx2M!!/0aWHODYBc0 No.2559659]

>>2559651
You're a dumb faggot, stfu

[Anonymous No.2559661]

>>2559659
Who are you again?

[Deep&Edgy !UfFKGtFx2M!!/0aWHODYBc0 No.2559664]

not interested dude fuck off cheers

[Anonymous No.2559665]

>>2559664
k

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559690]

>>2559646
What I mean about all this strong sentiment about taste and its subjectivity, and how standard people become arrogant over it and dislike the idea that a person with more knowledge has some or any grounds to derogate what they like, is that it's just one perspective. It's got it's real limits and is informed consistently by the arrogance of its subject (c.f. every 15 year old on this board with a bone to pick with Joyce, just cause the material is as yet inaccesible to them; the argument always then turns on academia and its ivory tower). There's nothing inherently wrong in all this, it just smacks to a certain degree of ignorance.

This is why evaluative academia is best avoided. It's a sensitive topic and Bloom doggedly trolls it for all it's worth. It's interesting, sure, particularly considering how developed Bloom's rhetoric is, but it's not intrinsically leading to any particular destination where we'll all sit around and muse about how brilliant a reader Bloom was.

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559693]

>>2559690

You then said that Marxist criticism was the same, dismissive, unnecessarily critical, with no end point because there is nothing that can't be criticized if the critic has enough imagination. What you're forgetting is that conceptually, the Marxist ethos was behind the great watershed moment of 20th century theory, when people started giving up on this idea of the autonomy of a bit of artwork. Looking back, we have Bakhtin in the 20's proposing something similar along more dogmatically Marxist hermeneutics, but we have to wait till the 70's when it starts to get stronger conceptual backing in Marxists like Derrida, Barthes, Sartre, etc. This does not just open things up to negative criticism, but to positive ways of understanding the text, of conceptualizing power as you say through Marxist thinking, but also of conceptualizing sexuality or motivation through psychoanalytical doctrine. You might argue the validity of these claims, with strong reason, but you're forgetting that Bloom ironically jumped on this bandwagon pretty early on with his doctrines of influence, his obsession with Gnostic thought and its potential for conceptualizing certain sorts of religious experience, transposing the Romantic soul into the dynamics of modernist literature. There's every bit of evidence that in some unconscious way Bloom followed the lead of Postmodern criticism, particularly in his emphasis on the permeability of text in his own special way and that this was integral to his survival and his reputation. What do you think, eh?

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559701]

>>2559655
Okay, this is as always, a complete mess of a response to what I said, but to be fair, there were some misleading typos in the original post.

What I meant to point with rhetoric, is Bloom's intimidatingly developed style, that in the case of his evaluating, is all that really sets him apart. As I mention in the two part post above, his evaluations are grounded to an extent but only through unconscious concessions to the very 'School of Resentment' he decries. To an extent, his theories of influence rely on a evaluating principle; this does not lessen the absurdity of opening up a work of critical literature on O'Neill and reading an academic telling just how little modern America drama lives up to Shakespeare's precedent.

[Anonymous No.2559710]

>c.f. every 15 year old on this board with a bone to pick with Joyce, just cause the material is as yet inaccesible to them; the argument always then turns on academia and its ivory tower

DUDE FACE IT, PORTRAIT ISN'T THAT GOOD FFS. IT'S LIKE, JOYCE'S WORST BOOK

[Anonymous No.2559716]

ALSO. CARACALLA IS A SHIT TIER EMPEROR LOOL

[Anonymous No.2559717]

>>2559716
Nah, Caracalla's pretty good, but I wish he would deign to be unverbose in a post or two.

[Deep&Edgy !UfFKGtFx2M!!/0aWHODYBc0 No.2559720]

>>2559693
>There's every bit of evidence that in some unconscious way Bloom followed the lead of Postmodern criticism
I think there is much more evidence that he is really not a postmodern critic in the most significant senses, and I'm willing to cite a passage that I think supports this very well.

'If you worship the composite god of historical process*, you are fated to deny Shakespeare his palpable aesthetic supremacy, the really scandalous originality of his plays. Originality becomes a literary equivalent of such terms as individual enterprise, self-reliance, and competition, which do not gladden the hearts of Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists, or Deconstructors'

*and it is pretty obvious to me that all he means by the 'composite god of historical process' is intertextuality, which is originally Bakthin's concept, but which I would hold to be the really core concept running through most post-struc criticism ever since Kristeva translated him and Tel Quel got ahold of him. How can you seriously be a real post-structuralist critic if you do not assent to something as fundamental as intertextuality (as good a concept as it is for looking at Joyce's work with)? And of course, Bloom doesn't assent to intertextuality because he loves literature too much, he respects great authors of literature too much to reduce them, in this insidious way that pomo theorists do, totally to amorphous social and cultural goop that every joe soap gets a constitutive share in.

[Anonymous No.2559723]

>>2559717
He's a poor man's D&E and always will be

[Anonymous No.2559728]

>>2559723
Sure, but >>2559717

[Anonymous No.2559729]

>>2559720

There are apolitical deconstructionists that do not do cultural, historic, material, or intertexual readings.

Just saying. There's nothing about deconstruction that says you have to do those kinds of readings. A lot of them are just slightly more radical proponents of New Criticism.

[Anonymous No.2559730]

>>2559728
why is your name blue is it because u are a fagot loool

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559734]

>>2559720
How could he dispute historical process that far? because surely his theory of influence is strongly grounded in intertextuality? I think you'll find there are concessions granted to postmodern criticism, whatever he would say to the contrary.

>>2559717
I should be a bit more circumspect sometimes, it gets to the point where I embark on these long sentences full of nesting clauses and miss out vital words and basically half of my posts are incomprehensible.

>>2559710
>>2559716
those remarks weren't necessarily directed at you, because there were a number of threads in the early winter that were just out to completely savage Joyce, for palpably stupid reasons. You're into him, and rightly consider Portrait to be his worst, but you're arguments against it were taking real liberties and I felt it my duty to step in.

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559737]

>>2559729
yeah, i said things to this effect, I guess, and fully support it.

[Anonymous No.2559743]

>>2559734
> and I felt it my duty to step in.

what a selfless hero you are

[Deep&Edgy !UfFKGtFx2M!!/0aWHODYBc0 No.2559744]

Hey apolitical deconstruc anon why don't you just take over for Caracalacalac he doesn't seem to be much of a fan of fighting his own battles

[Anonymous No.2559745]

>>2559737

Oh sorry, I wasn't actually following your discussion. I just saw that post and had to chime in.

[Anonymous No.2559747]

>>2559734
i remember those threads. pretty sure the person posting in them wasn't 15, but either way

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559748]

>>2559743
>Not interpreting self-deprecatory irony where it stares you in the face.

Now, I know why you always talk stupid...

[Anonymous No.2559750]

>>2559748
>interpreting
>irony

do you know how to use words?

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559757]

>>2559750
Well in this case, I was pretty sure the irony was gonna slap you in the face, and wasn't such a case of you getting out there and looking for it, but then again this is the person who's arrogant to express his silly opinions on the internet, I should really be making more exceptions for you, etc.

[Anonymous No.2559761]

>>2559757
k this time I see the irony before it was just shit.

[Caracalla !!S1oOkTjvsv2 No.2559765]

>>2559744
also

[Anonymous No.2559818]

This was just getting interesting and then you stopped.

[Anonymous No.2559841]

>>2559750
you see, you can tell he was joking because he used you're when he should have used your

[Anonymous No.2559844]

Bloom had some interesting things to say, not he just repeats himself.

Check out the Yale school book on Deconstruction he wrote with Derrida, Mann and Hartman. He's good a pretty good critique of deconstruction. Bloom uses (or used) deconstruction to some useful ends, without just playing around and trolling.

His gnostic/religious weird framework was pretty interesting. Compare, say, his early book on Wallace Stevens with some of his later work. There's a noticeable drop in quality.

I do tire of his need to always be nitpicking in comparing works. X book is good but it's not as good as Y. There's a time and a place for these comments and Bloom just abuses it as he's quite comfortable now (it seems) to be a brand name, and that somehow telling us that Garcia-Marquez is slightly less rich than Faulkner doesn't really tell you much about the work, especially when it's just a Bloom one-liner.

[Deep&Edgy !UfFKGtFx2M!!/0aWHODYBc0 No.2559867]

>>2559765