Is Bloom actually a good critic, or is he just a meme like Roger Ebert?

/thread

He's good but patchy, and he overdoes his enthusiasms (a bit like Leavis).

Yes, Shakespeare is good; yes, Dante is good, yes most modern crap is modern crap; yes, you should read a lot; yes, you should read classics.
Yes, Cormac McCarthy is good.

But on the other hand, he is very dogmatic, and he isn't always right, which means he says a lot of stuff very vehemently which is just nonsense.

He's very learned and sounds very authoritative, so if he's the ONLY critic you read, it's easy to get overwhelmed and believe everything he says. Don't do that.

tl;dr

he's ok, but don't get carried away

He's good and a good meme. Ebert is bad and a bad meme.

What has he said that is nonsense?

Bloom is a jewish gatekeeper who has no business around the cultural art forms of Europeans. He's only memed on here by a small clique of jews and their mindless shabbos goyim. Be wary of anyone on here pretending he's some kind of authority.

Well, it's a long time since I read any of his stuff. But I remember that for example in nThe Western Canon, he has a reading list at the end, which is notorious because it's so overwhelming.
But it's really haphazard - it has vast amounts of stuff that's simply not needed, and there are many startling gaps.

e.g. from William Golding he *only* has Pincher Martin. Lord of the Flies is a must-read, and The Spire and Free Fall and The Inheritors are at least as good as Pincher Martin.

He also doesn't seem to have Ted Hughes, who is one of the major English post-war poets - certainly more important than dozens of the people he does include.

Another example:- from George Orwell he just says 1984 and the Essays; but Animal Farm is another must-read (and very short and easy, so there's no excuse for omitting it). Also Homage to Catalonia should probably be read, and Down And Out In Paris And London. Certainly, these are much more important than a lot of the stuff he includes.

These are correct.
Bloom is very well read and has fine tastes.

A bit of history, Bloom received his honorary meme status by defending traditional academic literature reading in his "dead white male" oriented Canon.
With that view as well as blowing the fuck out of Harry Potter he cemented himself as the true king of Veeky Forums

The point of a critic is to bring attention to works that are deserving of more praise and show why given the critic’s framework, and to diminish or ignore popular works the critic thinks will be forgotten or should be forgotten.

He probably doesn’t have Ted Hughes because Hughes is a middle of the road poet whose only important work is Crow, and it’s far less well put together than somewhat peer works like Berryman’s Dream Songs. Though I think bloom dislikes those too. Hughes and Plath both were second rate poets who have popular appeal before they have critical appeal. Similar with other British poets like Larkin of the era

He doesn’t include animal farm because while 1984 is a mediocre novel that functions as a brilliant yet dated essay, animal farm is a childish novel that serves as a more trite essay. It’s a decent little work but it overlaps 1984 artistically and is definitely dated since the events it mocks and points to haven’t recurred since in history and it doesn’t make more than passing attempts to inspect the human spirit in a new creative way

My opinion is that Ebert and Bloom have nothing alike. Bloom is a bit of a wonky romantic but he is definitely an academic and writes academic book length forays across broad spectrums of works. Ebert gives star ratings and is very predictable in how he does it once you read a couple dozen reviews, and never really expressed any hint that he’s capable of comparing multiple films in a way that can bring about new understanding that transcends the individual films. Usually he’ll just rub two films together to compare the shortcomings of one to the strengths of another. He’ll reference a poet or something here or there to appear wise but it’s painfully easy to see through the fact he has no substance. Bloom has a cogent worldview, an extensive reading list, and moderately interesting ACADEMIC, THEMATIC, BROAD theories. He’s not nitpicking over the politics of District 9 being based on apartheid or just expressing the way in which pacing in a movie is flawed. That’s kiddie freshman English shit at best, and more realistically just high school intelligence and insight covered up with undergraduate flourish.

Anyways, I still prefer criticism from actual authors and poets over that of dedicated critics, largely because it’s more interesting to people who have any interest in generating art on their own. Not all of them are as bitingly ideological as Pound’s ABCs of Reading, Tarkovsky’s sculpting in time, Bresson’s principles of photography, or Nabokov’s sentence by sentence analysis and takedown of Quixote, but I find that they have more USEFUL criticism than dedicated critics.

TLDR my ranking of critics as they define certain archetypes of critics are Cornfather > Pound > Bloom = James Wood > Stephen Burt > power gap > Armond White > power gap > Ebert = Berardinelli

>Literary criticism = pop film reviews

The reading-list at the end of The Western Canon is definitely not presented as an "interesting counterpoint to well-known lists"; he definitely doesn't say, for example, "there are many things you should read which I haven't bothered to mention because they're obvious."

I'm not quite sure why anyone would spend so much time on the Ebert comparison, since OP simply introduced him as an example of a "meme" i.e. non-serious. He's nothing to do with Bloom.

I would tend to agree that Plath gets over-praised, simply because in the prevailing political climate, any strident female voice WILL be, but she's still a talent worth considering.

Calling Hughes or Larkin second-rate is completely ridiculous, even given that it's reasonable to focus on the work of one's own country (I assume you're from the USA).

His actual critical analysis is trash tier. I have never read anything he's written that opened up new insights or ways of thinking about the work in question. Mostly just really mundane, boring and off-the-mark takes.

>blowing the fuck out of Harry Potter
His most notable criticism was a renunciation of a supposedly oft repeated idiom that actually didn't occur more than once or twice in the text.

Presented as it or not, it’s simply what it is. The last part of contemporary works is admitted by bloom external to the list that it’s speculative and judgemental

Because both kind of are memes because Bloom has become a senile parody of himself and would rather bitch about poor works than actually do criticism now. I can spend my time as I like, it’s late and it’s Veeky Forums so the idea of questioning time spent here is quite shocking. This is a cesspool of English freshmen who like Pynchon largely because of a poop eating scene

What does my country have to do with Larkin and Hughes being mediocre poets? Larkin wrote populist Everyman poems with little linguistic grace, few of which are really memorable on a line by line basis. Nobody can really quote Hughes because his early works are moderately formally interesting but thematically lacking, Crow is a very thematic work that personally reminds me very much in style and tone to the Dream Songs by Berryman, which are obviously very different collections/narratives of poetry but are both very similar in function, and Berryman avoids more cliches and creates more meaning than Hughes does in that work. I really havent read any Hughes after Crow, but I’ve read enough to know that it’s probably along the same level of quality.

Heaney is a poet from that region that has a lot more value than Larkin or Hughes, though I don’t think much of him personally. There are minor poets on the list like RS Thomas who is perhaps not a first rate poet but is certainly more idiosyncratic and has much more to offer that peers don’t than Larkin (his gimmick of lowbrow poetry gets old quick) and Hughes (trend follower) do.

I’ll make it clear that Plath I find tedious but overall better than Larkin and probably a bit better than Hughes

Agreed Hughes is without a doubt a first rate poet as was Terry Pratchett a first rate novelist as is a fedora a first rate fabric helmet.

>he has a reading list at the end,
He says thats not a serious list but his publisher made him put it in

i believed in his school of resentment thing until i actually met another person who believed it- a retarded redneck

Wow user you're so enlightened, that sure dispels the whole theory right there

Reminder that Bloom disowned the list:
>The list was not my idea. It was the idea of the publisher, the editor, and my agents. I fought it. I finally gave up. I hated it. I did it off the top of my head. I left out a lot of things that should be there and I probably put in a couple of things that I now would like to kick out. I kept it out of the Italian and the Swedish translations, but it’s in all the other translations—about 15 or 18 of them. I’m sick of the whole thing. All over the world, including here, people reviewed and attacked the list and didn’t read the book. So let’s agree right now, my dear. We will not mention the list.
vice.com/en_us/article/4w4dk3/harold-bloom-431-v15n12

i believed the socialism thing til I met another person who believed it- a retarded humanities 20-something with no job prospects

>vice

he spent weeks on it and felt it was his crowning achievement
>my dear
do you guys just go around believing everything someone says?

im not mad y r u

No, for instance I don't believe what you say, because he went out of his way to make sure it wouldn't be in later editions and translations, my dear

Who is Cornfather meant to be?

exactly you well stretched faggot

Nabokov

Ebert is an excellent popular critic and a charming writer. No worse than Pauline Kael or Richard Brody

I went to community college may I enjoy th e rigors of academia