Mfw i'm harold bloom

I didn't exclude them. Their terribleness and irrelevance excluded themselves.

reminder: this is the real image

don't listen to OP, he's the cocksucker who remade 3D

#nevarforget

He's already talked shit about many of those authors. Check out his intros for those essay compilation things he's edited.

For example here's him talking shit about Heller:

>Catch-22 (1961) after more than forty years is definitive of what is meant by a Period Piece, a work not for all time, but for the 1960s and 1970s. If Catch-22 prophesied anything, it was the spirit of the Counter-Culture that began in the late 1960s and was dominant in the 1970s. By now, the Counter-Culture has been assimilated and co-opted; its principal organ is The New York Times. In the aura of an official Counter-Culture, Catch-22 can be read with nostalgia (though not by me) or with the qualified patience that a four-hundred-fifty-page extended joke demands if it is to be read at all.

Here's him shitting on On the Road:

I had not reread On the Road during the near half-century since its first
publication, and I am not happy at encountering it again. The book has many
admirers, including Thomas Pynchon, but I hardly understand what he, and
others, discover in this rather drab narrative. And yet I remain fascinated by
the phenomenon of Period Pieces, and by the sad truth that literary Period
Pieces, unlike visual ones, in time become rubbish. Like the Harry Potter
volumes, On the Road will be rubbed down and out. Since the once alienated
counter-culture is now the prevalent vogue in our mediaversities, even the
element of social protest in Kerouac has now faded away. Our society remains
under the rule of corporate robber barons, and I have to startle myself
sometimes in order not to believe that Benjamin Harrison or William
McKinley or Warren Gamaliel Harding is still our president. Social reality has
changed little in an America where the ruling party seems determined to so
bankrupt the federal government that only the military will be funded by it.
Kerouac’s vagrants are literate, self-pitying, afraid of women, and
condescending towards Mexicans and African-Americans. No one will
confuse them with Steinbeck’s displaced Okies, and no grapes of wrath are
trampled out by them. Nor are they doom-eager dreamers like Gatsby, or
monomaniac questers like Ahab, or benign wanderers like Huckleberry Finn.
Comparing On the Road to the masterpieces of Classic American fiction is
most unkind to Kerouac.

I can locate no literary value whatsoever in On the Road, but I must
admit the same blindness (if it is that) afflicts me when trying to reread the
verse of Allen Ginsberg, a good acquaintance whom I miss personally. Howl,
rather like On the Road, strikes me as an Oedipal lament, weeping in the
wilderness for a mother’s consolation. What both works lack sorely is the
delicately nuanced artistry of our father, Walt Whitman, whose greatest
poems may look easy, but actually are superbly difficult. On the Road and Howl
look easy, and are easy, self-indulgent evasions of the American quest for
identity.

I am Harold Bloom. I didn't make or remake any parts of either picture, but I can confirm the first picture is me. You are wrong and a charlatan, and I am Harold Bloom.

Oh great, here comes the guy who fucked up the C3 square, who got replaced, and who will now be haunted by this stunning failure the rest of his life.

Face it: you're at best the "Pete Best" of Bloom Squaring, punk. Let it go.

Good stuff, thanks.

How much were you bribed by Bret Easton Ellis to give David Foster Wallace a bad rap?

Bret Easton Ellis payed me approximately $3.50.

What do you think about Harry Potter?

My problem with this is that Howl and OTR (the scroll version) are both incredibly visceral and recompute the rules of syntax and storytelling. It might not be the High Narrative Art of Writing but they are clearly worth something, and if they're 'period pieces' as Bloom calls them, they they're the head of that class.

"Period piece" seems to be his preferred euphemism for "not canon-worthy". I remember him using it to rule out Harper Lee.

They're period pieces because they won't last.

That's not what he says.

And he admits that 'period pieces' retain lasting value in other media besides books. Perhaps he's just being stuffy and self-referential to get him through a half-ass criticism of a work that doesn't grab him.

Bloom doesn't rule out HArper Lee that quickly. He says rereading Mockingbird is an "ambivalent experience." He likes Scout, but says everyone else is shallow and that he doesn't know if the book will last.

I would wager Harold Bloom has never felt the fresh summer breeze upon his cock and balls.

What's wrong with O. Henry? Too plebby?

That is what he says though. That's his definition of a period piece: something that's written for the time only and won't last.

You've got the cause and effect backwards there though but whatever

My guess is he probably forgot to include O. Henry. May be true for Jack London as well.

Maybe he's fallible

I know he particularly lamented forgetting to include Guido Cavalcanti

He included Vonnegut, but excluded similar pleb-tier authors like Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. Why?

He likes O. Henry, he just doesn't think he's amazing.

>WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER IS A CENTRAL FIGURE IN AMERICAN POPULAR literature. He has a huge, permanent audience, and is all but identified with the short story as a genre, though he cannot be considered one of its inventors, or indeed one of its crucial innovators. His comic gifts are considerable though limited, and his careful naturalism is almost always shadowed by that of his precursor, Frank Norris. What matters most about O. Henry is the audience he has maintained for a century: ordinary readers who find themselves in his stories, not more truly and more strange, but rather as they were and are.

Either he didn't put it in his canon because he doesn't think he's that essential, or he just forgot because he came up with that thing at the top of his head in a couple hours and regrets some of the choices he's made and now wishes for everyone to forget about the list.

Insignificance probably.
I want to see what he thinks of Green.

Vonnegut was a cynic but the other two were full-blown nihilists

IIRC he lists O. Henry as one of the 30 or so best short story writers of the 20th c. somewhere

You're right. He likes Jack London: "A voyager, rancher, Socialist politician, a permanent adventurer, an incessant writer: London’s energies were beyond measure. He remains both a phenomenon of our imaginative literature, and a permanent figure in the American mythology."

My dog read Harry Potter. He liked it, but he's a pleb. I think Harry Potter is of the same quality as the typical David Wallace Foster novel.

He probably thinks Vonnegut is more talented. I know he doesn't like Henry Miller.

O'Henry is good. I was going to include him, but then his corpse resurrected and tried to fuck my wife.

>I want to see what he thinks of Green.

He probably doesn't think of him at all.

Remember, the dude's like 98 years old. He knows he's going to die. Why would he waste time on YA shit?

It's probably why he was so brief in his remarks DFW before. This guy sucks, I don't care, I'm close to death, just call him shit and let's move on.

I think this is his list:

O. Henry, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling, Ivan Bunin, Saki, Leonid Andreyev, W. Somerset Maugham, Thomas Mann, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Walser, Stephen Crane, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Karen Blixen, Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Anne Porter, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Babel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bowen, John Steinbeck, Frank O'Connor, Tommaso Landolfi, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Julio Cortazar, Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, Italo Calvino, Nadine Gordimer, Flannery O'Connor, Cynthia Ozick, Edna O'Brien, Donald Barthelme, Alice Munro, Walter Abish, John Updike, Raymond Carver and Reinaldo Arenas

He's pretty well-known for disliking Sylvia Plath in particular

When I hear "Green" I think Henry Green - truly a writer's writer.

The Western Canon is a spook.

Why won't he acknowledge Ezra Pound, guys?

Later works of Henry James and Joseph Conrad should probably be added to this. Chekhov might count as well.

Wait, why isn't Guy de Maupassant on that list?

Guy de Maupassant is a short story writer and is included in the Western Canon, while rival short story writer O. Henry is excluded. Yet the reverse occurs on this list.

I am Harold Bloom. Ezra Pound was a wannabe Italian who faked his insanity so to appear more Italian.

That was just a list I found in the archive. Here's the direct quote from his Alice Munro essay, where he only includes 20th c. writers (Maupassant died in the 19th c.):

I read through Alice Munro’s Selected Stories (1996) when that splendid
volume appeared and have just reread all of it a dozen years later. Her more
recent work is unknown to me, but the 545 pages of her culling from seven
books of stories are more than enough to suggest her permanence as a writer.
She joins the major artists of short fiction of the twentieth century: Landolfi,
Calvino, Hardy, Kipling, Maugham, Saki (H.H. Munro), Frank O’Connor,
Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Mann, Walser, Andreyev, Bunin, Dine-
sen, Schulz, Peretz, Singer, Agnon, Arenas, Cortázar, Gordimer, Wharton,
Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Nabokov,
Malamud, Ozick, Abish, Barthelme, and others. I omit the greatest: Henry
James, Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, Babel, Borges, Joyce, Faulkner,
Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald. Those ten stand apart, but Alice Munro is in
good company in the era of the short story.

Because he hates Pound.

This doesn't have O. Henry in it :I Lol oh well

It doesn't have Pound either.

Did he write stories?

Why is there a chapter on Freud in The Western Canon, but he is not in the appendix?

I don't know. He probably forgot to include Kierkegaard and Machado de Assis as well

Why does this old ass man get to dictate the canon. Tats ridiculous.

His canon is actually more descriptive than prescriptive, which is why he includes some writers he doesn't like, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Matthew Arnold. He knows it isn't perfect, and that it will keep changing.

he doesn't, but the cult of bloom is a funny phenomenon to engage with

he's been wrong before, but he's a good rule of thumb for recs and stuff. kerouac, for instance, he probably judged as a writer of fiction, when if he had seen him as a poet and memorist of sorts, it all would have made sense. bloom's not liking kerouac doesn't tough the meaningfulness or weight of kerouac's writing.

which is especially silly because he loves whitman, who did essentially the same thing but with a more rigid eye for detail where kerouac went for spontaneity, breaking with the literary tradition bloom gatekeeps

10/10
you got me
im mad

Stop approving of Salinger, its sophomoric fluff. I know you only do it because he is Jewish

He did say Catcher might be a Period Piece™

Where are you getting this anti-Pound vibe?

Bloom includes three works by Pound in the Western Canon.

They're mad that Bloom only considers him a good poet, and not a great poet.

>cannon

I think Bloom is considerably worse at judging authors who were alive while he was active. That seems a pretty fair inference to make

Or you just don't like his opinions...

It's not hard to dislike him tbhfam

Nice to meet you Harold, I'm writer

Maybe if you have no soul.

I don't have the book on me, but I remember him saying he dislikes Pound as a person and a critic, but is cool with some of his his poetry or something.

Just saying. Maybe he's better at weighing up an established tradition than making new entries to said thing. Remember that he never did any creative work which he liked in particular

no discernible talent

i dont think he would argue your critcism very much

he agrees wholeheartedly that canonical writers determine the canon, Milton's poem about Shakespeare, basically how they immortalize each other Milton from being raised by Shakespeare and Shakespeare by being ingested and digested by Milton giving him life in the modern (obv for Milton) world

so basically the canon for the past 100 years CANT be determined by a "thinker" except by saying that he thinks certain writers will be the canonical food which gives rise to the next generation of canonical writers ad infinitum (jk inc illiteracy and chaotic age)

>collage made by different anons
>all 3 meme trilogy authors make it in

Why has the "old" C3 been changed for this shite?

We can make it into a sliding puzzle if we leave out C3 entirely

rekt

I am Harold Bloom. Because it sucked.