He likes Joyce, Gaddis, Gass, Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon, but for some reason he hates DFW. Why is that?

He likes Joyce, Gaddis, Gass, Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon, but for some reason he hates DFW. Why is that?

He's just sad because everyone at Yale hates his guts.

Also DFW isn't in the same class as the authors you listed.

Except for Barth

Because DFW is less good.

>Also DFW isn't in the same class as the authors you listed.

DFW is very well respected among academics and common readers, and is part of the same tradition as Pynchon and the rest. There's no reason why Bloom should hate him.

Bloom hates DFW in part because DFW calls his writing "turgid" in IJ.

Bloom hates T.S. Eliot as a person and says his "literary critism did real harm" (quoting from his Best Poems in the English Language book), but he still says he's a great poet. Bloom isn't that petty. There has to be more to it, but he never explains anything. I though the point of a critic is to explain his opinions, but all he says is "it's terrible" and that's it.

It's rumored that Harold bloom and Richard montague were involved in a pretty hot and heavy love affair. Montague broke up with bloom which destroyed him and lead to him doing such destructive things as reading Derrida and championing the work of Paul de man. Some people even say bloom was involved in montague' a murder.

Well, DFW based a character on montague in infinite jest and Harold bloom just cannot accept it as a legitimate piece of literature for that reason.

He likes DeLillo and Pynchon.

DFW just continued on in their vein (particularly Pynchon's. Read Gravity's Rainbow and then Infinite Jest, and the latter will basically just look like a more mundane (and thus, ostensibly more postmodern and therefore contemporary) take on the techniques attempted in the former.

I don't think DFW can pull off Pynchon, even though he clearly tried. And I think Bloom realized this, along with the fact that DFW's prose can't really compete.

Previous commenter here. I've taken classes with Bloom; he respects a small selection of Eliot's poetry but thinks it's hugely overrated. I suspect that if Eliot himself had 'called out' Bloom in his work in the way that DFW did, Bloom would be similarly incensed, less respectful of his opinion.

> I've taken classes with Bloom

Give us details, please

I don't give a fuck, I just love the old man so much that if he says some author is shit I'll never ever read that writer.

And I'm only partially memeing, mind you.

He's a dumb fat fuck who lectures to undergrads only bc no grad students respect him or would ever want to work with him

I had seminar with him last year at Yale. He's very, very infirm but his mind is still really sharp. He held classes at his home near the campus. He has incredible mental recall of pretty much every poet that got mentioned in our class, which was based on The Anxiety of Influence. It was an interesting experience.

This comment is why I come to Veeky Forums

this makes me like Bloom more

Eliot's literary criticism was very bad

I really can't stand DFW's prose. He appropriated the worst qualities of writing in his times (which I think he showed some awareness of in 'Fictional Futures', but perhaps not towards a true alternative), for a single, blunt affect. Infinite Jest is the perfect nineties novel, but only for people who grew up in the nineties. In the future, it's greatness will only be considered along those lines, as a period piece.

His nonfiction is better though.

>I suspect that if Eliot himself had 'called out' Bloom in his work
?? Eliot published Bloom which gave him a huge kickstart as an academic. They even met in person.

As someone who only knows vaguely of the "New Criticism" can you tell me why you think that? What exactly was Eliot's approach and why is it dangerous?

That person was making a hypothetical point and you're only furthering his point.

>Bloom says writer who he hates but who kickstarted his career is great
>Bloom says writer who mocked him in a popular novel is shit

It's easy to see how someone could see ego involved.

>what exactly

I don't owe you an exact and polished version of my opinion

I've read his criticism and he has a bad habit of being wrong. About Hamlet, about Milton, about tradition, etc. For every one reader who feels the mighty anger under—

How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep?

—for each one of these there are today at least ten idiots who can repeat Eliot's nonsense about the absence of an "objective correlative", and that is, as Bloom called it, "real harm". I suppose Eliot could imagine no objective correlative for anger when his wife fucked Bertrand Russell behind his back. The rest of us know better.

It would be more interesting imo if he had a personal conversation on literature with Bloom.

Could have happened. I remember Bloom in an interview saying he likes students to come early and talk to him about shit, but maybe he doesn't do that anymore and needs his precious little remaining freetime.

Bloom student, did you have good talks with Bloom or something? Did he have any cool judgements we haven't heard of before?

He only teaches graduate seminars...

I feel like I sort of "understood" Infinite Jest, and i've never read anything more profound. I did fine some of DFWs short stories a bit edgy feels though.

Nah faggot

Bloom has never written a serious novel. He has no fucking clue what he is talking about. He is just a pundit, a critic who couldn't cut it as an actual artist so he got a few degrees and jerked himself up the ladder of academia, but he can never walk the walk. I almost feel bad for him. Maybe he's salty because Infinite Jest speaks to actual human beings, who actually take risks and actually parttake in the human experience. He is just a shell of a human, spending a lifetime poking superficial holes in the works of some of the smartest people who ever lived, knowing he cannot muster up a decent work of literature, let alone anything even close to what these writers can create.

It's actually kind of ironic. Harold Bloom has never written a novel but the average person who knows of him can write a novel just on how much of a gigantic fucking faggot he is.

DFW took a potshot at Bloom in IJ

366 Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom's turgid studies of artistic influenza — though it's unclear how either Flood- or dead-ancestor discussions have any connection to S. Peterson's low-budget classic The Cage, which is mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around, other than the fact that J. O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could; maybe the 'disjunction' or 'disconnection' between the screen's film and Ph.D.'s scholastic discussion of art is part of the point.a

a. (Which of course assumes there's a point.)

Link to Bloom discussing Gass?

it's probs a more personal conversation, we all have gass, even women

Intetadesting...

Why say this when you don't know anything about the man? He has written and published fiction and his literary criticisms are objectively good art. Just because you read IJ and loved it doesnt mean you need to parrot everything DFW says.

>this whole post

You are just a precocious young user talking the same old uninformed bullshit. There can be legitimate artistry to criticism. Read more.

He praises Eliot only to serve as a stepping stone to praise Hart Crane even more. If Eliot's The Wasteland has value, well Hart Crane's is a stronger misreading.

But deep down all Bloom does is stuff Freud back into Eliot., while weirdly claiming Hamlet "evades" Freud and it's Freud who has a Shakespeare complex! He's not even a good Shakespearean. With nothing interesting to say especially when it comes to Hamlet. I'm not Foucault-ian, but he has more to offer on Shakespeare than does Bloom.

Why does he hate DFW? Wallace made a jab at him in the footnotes and spoke openly about trying to be a Christian. All things that would make Bloom cringe.

Bloom has too much pride to do that to DFW.

>he has a bad habit of being wrong
kek. gonna use that sentence quite often from now on