Harold Bloom negs every writer who isn't Shakespeare

ooooooooooooooooh

Seriously? I feel like you've never read the book if you believe that he discredits anyone who isn't Shakespeare.

Maybe not quite willfully but when each chapter is laced with "but Shakespeare did it better" rhetoric, its kind of hard to overlook the fact that, rather than Proust or Macbeth, Bloom is in fact the character most significantly afflicted with Freudian 'sexual' jealousy in the whole book. Clearly, Its easier for him to live without artistic pretensions when he can reduce the talent all around him to a point of singularity that happily encompasses and resorbs the entire category of 'the written word' itself. We all know about his less than stellar foray into novelizing, so his desire to at least sit on the stoop of the pantheon can't be ignored. Bloom's ridiculous fallacy can be seen plain as day in lines like "it is both and neither, as is always the case with Shakespeare." He makes Shakespeare whatever he needs him to be to make his point. Can Shakespeare form a rock so massive even he himself cannot lift it? Well the Schroedinger's Shakespeare of Bloom's convenience surely can. Its just too silly

And I don't mean to say anything about Shakespeare who is certainly an unassailable figure in spite of whatever Bloom's preoccupations may or may not be. But to essentially begrudge every writer their individual worth by explicitly painting them as mere epigones to one man seems so preposterous that I can't help but impute some agenda here.

>trying to attack papa Bloom

Pathetic desu

Got any arguments besides Japanese meme filters?

>Freud ... the greatest essayist since Montaigne

Only proves that there's no such thing as a universal canon. There are only personal canons.

shakespeare invented the human senpai

Which essayist would you pick?

I think this is the best simile I've ever read on Veeky Forums

This is the least educated person on Veeky Forums.

He doesn't because he's a pseud with no answer in hand

Bloom is a meme

I'm still stuck in the intro where he builds and then rants about the strawman of "muh SJW academia", if I want to read that shit I come here

I skipped the intro, I recommend starting from chapter 3 (Dante), then read 1-2, then read in normal order.

That's a good recommendation, cheers!

I also highly recommend Marcel Reich-Ranicki's essays, that guy had a similar role to Bloom in German literary culture with less of a fixation on the "greats". He was also much nicer than Bloom, less ranting. Not sure how much has been translated into English.

It's not a strawman. He's obviously correct.

do it man. just do it.

No. Read the whole book, you pussy. What are you, an intellectual coward baby pussy lol? You afraid he'll challenge your worldview and maybe even change your mind? Lol pussy.

Shakespeare's pretty great desu.

The only part of the book that even matters is the invective against SJW-infested academia. The rest is just Bloom saying how everyone's not as good as SHakespeare.

Whether you agree with Freud or not, he changed how we read literature for the better half of the 20th Century. Bloom passed his canon off his own reading, but that doesn't mean he didn't think about anyone else's.

>triggered the retards again

Here's your (You)

>im autistic and a whiny baby coward who refuses to read anything that goes against my extremely fragile point of view waaaaaah

>strawman

Nobody of intelligence actually believes pervasive Marxist sentiment that expurgates all opposing viewpoints is anything but a grotesque ramifying disease. The Marxists on Veeky Forums merely adhere to the idea that one may remain on the left in spite of it. /pol/ is the knee jerk reaction to languishing in an Adornian system of ressentiment where everything is bad is good

But the antipodal measure-for-measure ridiculousness of /pol/'s rhetoric should not lead one to the fatuous idea that the other side might be correct. That's the kind of bad-faith thinking that is the lifeblood of partisan politics. Its how a political affiliation becomes a brand rather than a philosophical idea. Its how a corporate goon and warmonger like Obama can receive a Nobel Peace Prize to the applause of millions of faux-leftist loonies like yourself.

Thank you

This has nothing to do with Harold Bloom, faggots

>He makes Shakespeare whatever he needs him to be to make his point.

In a vulgar attempt at "critique," you assess Bloom negatively for his dynamic appraisal of the value of Shakespeare, no doubt with the goal of showing Bloom's slavish idolatry of the "dead white male" par excellence. While Bloom's canon, no doubt, does tend to err on the side of phallic and European, I think it is far more productive to, rather than ask what psychosexual abnormality in Bloom causes him to read Shakespeare in such a way, ask what is it about Shakespeare that permits such a panoply of apparently contradictory readings? How can it be that this poet and playwright forms the tabula rasa upon which not only any number of (as you argue) instrumental critiques can be inscribed, but indeed upon which the entire Western canon can be heaped and judged as though his corpus were a one-sided scale of blind justice?

Social Justice has very little to do with Marxism, and everything to do with French post-structuralism. Many people in academia are far more convinced nowadays, thanks mostly to de Man and Derrida, by the latter, leaving the actual collective praxis advocated by the former to grope in an intellectual darkness into which it has been plunged by the likes of you.

He doesn't value Freud for his psychology if that's what you're thinking. It's kind of like how people will do a Freudian analysis of Shakespeare, he does the exact opposite.

No, I am about as offensively right wing as one can possibly be; partly in acknowledged bad-faith and out of sheer spite for the cultural milieu I deign to continue living within. I just think he has taken the idolatry to such an exaggerated point that it strains credulity. I think maybe some of the other dead white males should get unconditional sunlight as well.

Shit me, I just fell for bait

pseud detected.

Actually it just came from the civil rights movement going too far and turning into race and gender-based chauvinism. It doesn't have anything to do with these ivory tower pseudo-philosophers

Wrong.

This metaphor is a microcosmos of why the West™ is dying.

Actually I'm right.

he explicitly says that Ibsen was the better dramatist and at no point does he ever withhold praise on account of "Shakespeare being better"

he does (rightly) place Shakespeare in the heart of the canon, but the only times he comes close to doing what you suggest is when he discusses Joyce's passage in Ulysses revealing his own grave fear that he was an inferior Shakespeare

What? No, he criticizes Joyce for saying that while calling the assertion "absurd" and subtly suggesting it was just a defense mechanism of Joyce in order to diminish Shakespeare. Whether or not he pats a few writers on the back the book is offensively centered around Shakespeare for someone who wants a balanced and unalloyed presentation of the Canon in its entirety. Worse yet are the divagations to 'Freud saids'

>Adorno
>"everything bad is good"

Have you even read Aesthetic Theory or his books on music criticism? Adorno was an enormous elitist and a big defender of traditional (and even bourgeois) art.

I'm so sick of the Le Cultural Marxism maymay, it's a red flag that reveals that whoever utters that phrase doesn't actually read, to excellent precision.

Adorno favoured Schoenberg over Stravinsky. You can defend the 'bad' and aesthetically uncanny under the banner of elitism. How do you think we got in this mess to begin with?

Have a link to the books Bloom listed as part of the canon:

interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

hm i thought he gave the statement more credence than that, but its been a while

regardless, there are entire sections with hardly a mention of shakespeare (notably the novelists, goethe, dickens, eliot) you act like his reading of shakespeare is some poison which contaminates the entire book, but how many authors does he really criticize for their inferiority to shakespeare? (or from whom does he withhold praise on account of shakespeare)

it's the result of leftists needing to build an elaborate theoretical apparatus in order to reject the reality of behavioral and mental differences between the races and genders.

How did Shakespeare invent human consciousness again?

I checked and there isn't a single chapter without a reference to Shakespeare or one or more of his works

Aesthetically uncanny does not universally equal bad. And one example doesn't discredit Aesthetic Theory, or The Culture Industry, or Prisms, Notes to Literature, The Philosophy of New Music, Searching For Wagner, Composing Music For Films, or any of the number of works he's written that people who perpetuate the Le Cultural Marxism maymay on the internet have not actually read.

The phrase "Cultural Marxism" is itself nonsensical and it could only be parroted by someone who actually hasn't read Marx. I say this as a reactionary.

>How do you think we got in this mess to begin with?

Definitely not by the unwashed masses reading Adorno, nor by a conspiracy taken up by Adorno to brainwash said unwashed masses, mostly due to the fact that nobody fucking read Adorno, including the memelords who have recently tried to turn him into a Marxist SJW bogeyman. Furthermore, Marxism is so far removed from modern day SJW leftism that there's almost no resemblance besides a vague, impotent ressentiment towards capitalism and towards success within capitalism. These are memes perpetuated by the uneducated.

That's a pretty drastic misreading. Adorno saw them each as continuing the disintegration of the sonata.

Actually they don't need to do that, they can just call you a racist.

I think the main boogeyman is Horkheimer actually, probably because he was head of the Institute for Social Research when it moved to the United States.

Harold Bloom is simply a Freudian T.S. Eliot (the critic, not the poet).

Bump

The book is actually surprisingly unprofessional all around. Given that the book is called 'The Western Canon' one would expect a series of well-composed expository critical essays. Instead its really just an old smart man rambling at length about whatever the fuck he wants with the author's and works acting as talking points. In 'Elegy For The Canon" it seems sensible to rant about politically motivated academics. In an article on Beckett it just comes across as vulgar. I honestly wonder if he was occasionally drunk while he wrote this.

""""unprofessional"""" is a meme

eshthrowmane

Does Bloom have anything to say about Homer?

He has a few pages on Homer in his book Genius.

How does he defend Homer having such a small part in his analysis of western literature?

Probably because he didn't want to talk about more than 26 authors, and had to exclude a few very important ones.

He doesn't include the Bible either.

Here are the 100 authors Bloom writes about in Genius.

>the Bible
>Western

wtf is this occultist bullshit

moron

>including a Jewish fairy tale in an essay book about the WESTERN canon

moron

>nietzche
>understanding

>twain
>eternity

>muhammad
>saint paul
>freud
>plato
>wisdom

Bloom loves that Gnostic/Kabbalbleh crap.