/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6847546]

>HB: I spend a good part of my life in bookstores – I give readings there when a new book of mine has come out, I go there to read or simply to browse. But the question is what do these immense mountains of books consist of? You know, child, my electronic mailbox overflowing with daily mesages from Potterites who still cannot forgive me for the article I published in Wall Street Journal more than a year ago, entitled "Can 35 Million Harry Potter Fans Be Wrong? – Yes!" These people claim that Harry Potter does great things for their children. I think they are deceiving themselves. I read the first book in the Potter series, the one that's supposed to be the best. I was shocked. Every sentence there is a string of cliches, there are no characters – any one of them could be anyone else, they speak in each other's voice, so one gets confused as to who is who.
>IL: Yet the defenders of Harry Potter claim that these books get their children to read.

>HB: But they don't! Their eyes simply scan the page. Then they turn to the next page. Their minds are deadened by cliches. Nothing is required of them, absolutely nothing. Nothing happens to them. They are invited to avoid reality, to avoid the world and they are not invited to look inward, into themselves. But of course it is an exercise in futility to try to oppose Harry Potter.


>Byatt - Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ''only personal.'' Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

Your hatred (and love of course) for the series, fans, the people being quoted and Rowling

Are Bloom and Byatt correct?

[Anonymous No.6847575]

Whether they are or not I doubt anyone here, whatever side they're on, will ever change their minds, no matter how much this is talked about.

[Anonymous No.6847647]

harry potter brings people together bitch!

[Anonymous No.6847682]

There is a certain lack of the transcendent in Harry Potter, I'll grant Byatt that.

Notice how the afterlife only shows up once, and there is no talk of gods or higher powers. All mythological figures that might stand in as true origins of authority (like, say, the leprechauns or the giants) are played off as monsters or creatures, with no special significance attached to them.

Harry Potter is a godless world, which is very interesting considering the whole matter of the book is the supernatural.

[Anonymous No.6847754]

Of course Bloom is right just look at this
>http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/63195-ya-tops-nielsen-and-kindle-lists-for-2014-so-far.html#path/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/63195-ya-tops-nielsen-and-kindle-lists-for-2014-so-far.html

>75% of the list is YA/children's books
>a third of that (25% of the total list) are novelizations of the movie Frozen
>10% of the list are video game guides
>the only nonfiction books are religious, and one of them claims to be first hand account of life after death
>the only non religious, non children's, non video game book is a Pulitzer Prize winner from last year
>every book except for the devotional and the Pulitzer has had a movie adaptation

[Anonymous No.6847758]

>>6847682
even in the last movie isn't there like an afterlife scene and doesn't dumbledore mention something about a god or something or love or something

[Anonymous No.6847763]

>>6847758
something very vague

[Anonymous No.6847779]

>>6847546

Did he ever read the rest? I can't imagine his opinion improving but I'm sure he'd have some other things to say

[Anonymous No.6847792]

>>6847779

He didn't even read any of it.
>I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

That phrase is used once in the whole book.

[Anonymous No.6847869]

>>6847792
probably included synonyms, or maybe he couldn't recall exactly what he had been marking down, maybe it was just cliches
you can't deny that the first book is amateurish

[Anonymous No.6847898]

>>6847869

That definitely makes much more sense. Silly old Bloom.

[Anonymous No.6847909]

"Getting kids to read period" is clearly the wrong strategy.

Only way to save literature in America would be a total revamp of the middle and high school curriculum. The novels themselves and also they way they are taught. No more moral, issues, politics, gender, race related readings and teaching.

Assign good books, tell the kids to read them. The problem is kids are too good at the internet

[Anonymous No.6847916]

>>6847909
>No more moral, issues, politics, gender, race related readings and teaching.
literally can you be any more retarded

[Anonymous No.6847984]

Bloom is right. From personal experience, most people who are raised reading Harry Potter and latch onto it go on to read and produce vacuous YA fiction that functions only as escapism. They may be exposed to classics but they see these myopically in the eyes of what books like Harry Potter accomplish, which pretty much amount to just being wish-fulfillment, naive construals of the individual as the supreme truth of the world.

It's basically a giant circlejerk, and not in the productive way of philosophy being a giant circlejerk. It's a circlejerk with no climax, just endless self-satisfaction.

[Anonymous No.6849156]

why does bloom hate king so much?

[Anonymous No.6849170]

>>6849156
He's a commercial fiction writer. Why wouldn't Bloom hate him?

[Anonymous No.6849364]

This is absolute bullshit. I've never read any Harry Potter but most of the people I study lit with got interested in literature thanks to Harry Potter in the first place, and a lot of these people are pretty descent writers and avid readers of much more complex shit than Harry Potter now, none of them read Stephen King. Mr Harold Bloom is your typical grumpy senile "muh golden age" conservative critic who has basically only ever read Shakespeare profoundly and not much else. The man doesn't even recognise the importance of Dostoyevsky in his bullshit "western canon" because, let's be honest, he's probably never even read him, just like most of the stuff he criticises. Don't believe everything these critic old shits tell you, they're just struggling to maintain themselves relevant with edgy and "witty" one liners.

[Anonymous No.6849405]

>>6849156
>Alexander Pope warned against breaking a butterfly upon a wheel, so I will avoid King’s obvious inadequacies: cliché-writing, flat characters who are names upon the page, and in general a remarkable absence of invention for someone edging over into the occult, the preternatural, the imaginary.

[Anonymous No.6849406]

>>6849156
Stephen King's induction into the ranks of literary authors, when rightfully he should be consigned to the temporary world of commercial fiction, demonstrates to him the objective degeneration of high as well as popular culture.

[The cats No.6849436]

>>6849364

Veneration of Harry Potter is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.

[Anonymous No.6850554]

Not completely. It certainly shouldn't be read as an adult, and it's not necessarily 'good' for kids, but it's not harmful either and I found them immensely entertaining as a kid.
>They are invited to avoid reality, to avoid the world and they are not invited to look inward, into themselves.
That's what being a kid is. And the one chapter in the Order of Phoenix I think it was where it was revealed that Snape was a good guy and Harry's dad was a cunt to him was my first clash of conscience ever reading, the first time a book ever 'stabbed' me, since I hated Snape so much up until that point due to my natural hatred of oppressive teachers. I mean, obviously as the best literary critic such an obvious plot twist that had been foreshadowed so blatantly would have no effect on him if he actually read it, but to an 11-year old it's way beyond anything they've read.

[Anonymous No.6850608]

>>6847916
>>No more moral, issues, politics, gender, race related readings and teaching.
>literally can you be any more retarded
Telling people about >muh slavery and >muh wymyn isn't what he implied there

[Anonymous No.6850650]

>>6847916
>No more moral, issues, politics, gender, race related readings and teaching.
You're fucking right lad, we should teach books by minorities just because. Toni Morrison and not Melville am I right? Get the fuck out of here. Any art that must lean on politics is worthless. Idiots like you are exactly the problem here. You don't encourage children to look for art or desire to become artists, you just want to project whatever is at the very back of your ideology. Absolutely disgusting tbh

[Anonymous No.6850671]

>>6850650
eh, toni morrison is a beautiful read, though, tbh.

[Anonymous No.6850673]

>>6850671
>oni morrison is a beautiful read
laughingnabokov.jpg

[Anonymous No.6850684]

>>6849364
The thing is (from someone who read from 1 through 5, by the time 6 and 7 came out, I was already reading other stuff): EVERYONE read those books, and I studied with the same people my whole life, grew in a small town and etc., so I sort of accompanied a lot of these people's growth, from say, 30 people who read the books, 5 or 6 have any interest in literature, and from these, I only know of one girl and a friend of mine who read anything besides textbooks, YA or best-seller shit.

So, if it wasn't Harry Potter, it would've been LotR, or comics or I don't know, absolutely anything else, that would hook people into literature.

[Anonymous No.6850701]

>>6850650
Every book is a political book, you utter fucking shithead. Just because you pretend like your fifth-grade reading list is ideology-free doesn't make it so.

>Toni Morrison and not Melville am I right?
Sure, that'd be great. Melville is a third-rate hack from a cultural backwater that is overrated by jingoistic idiots from Murricastan. Morrison is actually interesting.

[Anonymous No.6850708]

>>6850650
>u don't encourage children to look for art or desire to become artists,
Ironically this attitude is part of what's holding back minority artists. Their over-concern with race leads them to craft narrow childish worlds in their writing. Of course there are many exceptions- Ellison, Du Bois, Wright, but on the whole the black community has not produced as much written art as it should have. Obviously poverty and black culture are also to blame for this, but the students who do form an interest shouldn't be encouraged to lean on political thought.

[Anonymous No.6850716]

>>6850701
kek you just made this one too obvious, though I did laugh at you calling NYC a backwater.

[Anonymous No.6850717]

>>6850708
Minority artists are held back by their lack of ability to create art.

[Anonymous No.6850732]

>>6850716
It was absolutely a cultural backwater. No good novels were written in the states until the 20th century. It's a bankrupt, boring as fuck country with no originality and rabid anti-intellectualism.

That's why the pedigree novels are Huckleberry Finn, Scarlet Letter and that atrocious Moby Dick bullshit.

[Anonymous No.6850733]

>>6847916
>>6847909
should start using obscure classics, the ones sparknotes hasn't ruined for the youth

[Anonymous No.6850749]

>>6850650
You realize not ignoring politics and moral teachings doesn't entail "teaching Toni Morrisson just because", right ? In order to ignore politics you'd have to ignore an essential aspect of the majority of our literature actually. What you're advocating is non-teaching, that is to say abandoning the project of teaching literature in school. At this point you have no way to tell wether the kids are reading the books, and not much reason to care either.

[Anonymous No.6850753]

>>6850732
>rabid anti-intellectualism.
You've failed again, this wasn't the case until very recently. Celine himself lamented that literature was more widely read in the US and Britain than in France,and Nabokov said he loved the intellectual atmosphere. You seem to slightly believe your bait so I replied lel

[Anonymous No.6850758]

>>6850749
>In order to ignore politics
Stopped reading there, you haven't bothered even to understand the post you're replying to. Nothing even remotely close to that was posted.

[Anonymous No.6850770]

>>6850753
You do know that Celine was alive in the 20th century?
Is that why you're such an utter retard, because you only read every other fucking word?

Read Richard Hofstatder's book on anti-intellectualism in the united states, you boring semi-illiterate twat.

[Anonymous No.6850773]

>>6850770
>You do know that Celine was alive in the 20th centur
>it is
You do realize the 19th century can't be referred to with "is?" Learn to speak English before you recommend books or post your nonsense "ideas" on English language imageboards.
>Read Richard Hofstatder's book on anti-intellectualism in the united states
>read a recommendation by an illiterate who speaks English as his second language
>"read something that confirms my views"
Nah I think I'll pass. You've already shown yourself to have shit taste in literature, your opinions are as worthless as you are.

[Anonymous No.6850793]

>>6850773
Haha fucking /pol/tard implodes publically.

>it is
Where the fuck did I write "it is"?
It's written "it's", it's (it is, to help your autismal reading comprehension) a contraction for "it was".

Fuck off to your containment board, you imbecile.

[Anonymous No.6850829]

>>6850793
>Haha fucking /pol/tard implodes publically
Nigger, I'm a leftist. Don't be so fucking scared and desperate, it's only 4chan.

>Where the fuck did I write "it is"?
This post>>6850732

>It's written "it's", it's (it is, to help your autismal reading comprehension) a contraction for "it was".
Fucking cringe, I've never seen such a sad Hail Mary attempt. It's is only "it has" or "it is." I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you meant "it is," although you may actually be dumb enough to have written "it has a bankrupt." Your contraction is never used, so it's quite obvious what you meant, my poor little newfag

You can still turn your computer off and pretend this never happened or pretend to be trolling, that's it.

[Anonymous No.6850846]

>>6850758
>Stopped reading there, you haven't bothered even to understand the post you're replying to.

I've bothered to understand the post as it was written, not as what you think everyone should have understood. If two different anon were mistook on that (because I'm not the first guy replying to you) then perhaps you should reflect on the formulation you used.

>Nothing even remotely close to that was posted.

Really ?

>No more moral, issues, politics, gender, race related readings and teaching.

So "no readings and teaching related to moral, issues, politics" is not even remotely close to ignoring politics or refusing to consider the political aspect of literature ?I'd understand "not identical", but "not even remotely close" ? Are we using the same language ?

[Anonymous No.6850852]

>>6850829
>Nigger, I'm a leftist.

No, you're not. You might be /leftypol/, but there's not a single leftist on that board.

>Fucking cringe, I've never seen such a sad Hail Mary attempt.

What a sad fucking retard. "I've never seen it means it doesn't exist!"

Fuck off.

[Anonymous No.6850853]

>>6850846
>"no readings and teaching related to moral, issues, politics"
Why is this quoted? It was not written verbatim nor was it even implied.

[Anonymous No.6850857]

>>6847546
They're right but really, what kind of insight can they hope to give?

The noumenal is a farce to me, all we have is the personal. Let an idiot read.

[Anonymous No.6850877]

>>6850852
>No, you're not. You might be /leftypol/, but there's not a single leftist on that board.
Kek, le pol boogieman, yeah yeah I've heard it before. I don't go on /pol/ or its affiliated sites, you're just desperate on a mongolian book board of all places.
>What a sad fucking retard
My sides, I can't stop laughing at this. You type like those "cringe" pictures of 14 year olds on facebook. Keep this shit coming lad.
>"I've never seen it means it doesn't exist!"
No, it certainly exists in the little minds of people like you, but that doesn't make it grammatically valid bb
Should've just closed the tab, I can tell you're going to be thinking of this one for a while lel

[Anonymoose No.6851598]

> Modern America is a boundless sea of glassy eyed morons

We all know this. What are we going to do about it?

[Anonymous No.6851605]

>>6849364
>descent writers
Stopped reading there.

[Anonymous No.6852201]

will bloom ever right a film review?

[Anonymous No.6852206]

>>6852201
or write even

[Anonymous No.6852232]

>Bloom will die before you get published
>you will never know if Finnegans Wake 2: Electric Boogaloo will make him proud or have him call you out of your lack of discernible talent

[Anonymous No.6852241]

>>6847909
Holy shit, fucking this. I read Stoner not too long ago and I was pissed at how much people seemed to have cared about literature in Stoner's time versus now. I mean, the novel was written in the 60s, so it's possible literature programs were shit in Williams's own time, but they're certainly a travesty today

[Anonymous No.6852334]

>>6850701
>Implying Morrison is greater than Melville.
I'd say you're either illiterate or black, but I'm guessing the answer is probably both. What a fucking joke. There isn't anything that Morrison has written which comes even close to Moby Dick, but you probably wouldn't know that because you've never read it you fucking pleb.

[Anonymous No.6852432]

I haven't read Harry Potter, but Bloom is usually right about things.

[Anonymous No.6852448]

>>6849364
>Mr Harold Bloom is your typical grumpy senile "muh golden age" conservative critic who has basically only ever read Shakespeare profoundly and not much else.

Why do you insist on criticising based on pure speculation, some thing you could possibly not know?
Aside from that, I am under the impression that he is well read, the contrary being improbable.

[Anonymous No.6852462]

>>6847546
Dude's an old motherfucker. Rowling might be abject trash, but I trust what that coot says about as much as I trust Bernie Sanders to win a presidential nomination.

[Anonymous No.6852482]

>>6849364
If your contemporaries have as poor command of the language they study as you do it does not bode well for their origins are harry potter fans.

[Anonymous No.6852562]

>>6849364
The list in his western canon is something he regrets greatly and was pressured into by his editors, he said he did it "off the top of his head"

[Anonymous No.6852592]

>>6849364
>who has basically only ever read Shakespeare profoundly and not much else
kek look at him and laugh

[Anonymous No.6853666]

>>6852482
lel

[Anonymous No.6855452]

>Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

[Anonymous No.6855475]

>>6855452
He doesn't criticize the books for being childish. He criticizes them for being badly written schlock entirely made up of cliches.

[Anonymous No.6855508]

>>6852334
>replying to philistines
Don't do it mate

[Anonymous No.6855527]

>>6850852
I'm sorry but this is pure bollocks. "It's" is not a contraction of "It was". As anon said, it's either "It is" or "It has"
This isn't a prescriptive vs descriptive thing: not even colloquially is it used to represent "it was"

[Anonymous No.6855546]

>>6855475

This. If you want to know what children's books Harold Bloom likes:
http://www.mrbauld.com/bloomjr.html