Bloom is a reactionary tilting at windmills. He appeals to a popular but largely inaccurate idea that cutthroat postmodernists have shown up to wrest Shakespeare from the hands of the reading public and force them to read Mary Wroth instead. Who are the people saying this? A shadowy cast of Frenchified literary critics that Bloom never seriously engages with. Why, it's almost as if Bloom's idea that the discussion of canonicity in the eighties and early nineties is affirmative action designed to replace aesthetically superior authors with minority also-rans is a broad caricature that can't descend to taking the claims of those who sought to expand the canon seriously, because rather than being a serious scholarly claim, it's sky-is-falling nonsense for people too coy to say directly that they think "anti-racist is anti-white."
The peculiar thing, of course, is that Bloom's accuses his enemies of wanting to stop people from reading the works he considers canonical - which, though I'm sure one could dig up critics saying inflammatory things about the canon, let's be clear that there was never a moment in time where there was any real threat that the literature Bloom identifies as canonical would stop being taught or studied - but, in point of fact, his argument is really about suppressing his opponent's views. He insists that people shouldn't teach or study aesthetically inferior works. In effect, he says, "It's not about stopping people from reading books written by people of color/women; it's about ethics in aesthetic selection!"
This is dissatisfying to me for many reasons.
First, I think that describing the history of literature is central to what critics should do. Bloom's Anxiety of Influence work is an attempt to rewrite the history of literature so that it takes place only in the personal and aesthetic realm rather than on the larger stage of history. I don't know if you've ever looked at that work, but it's mystagogic bullshit, interesting in its goals but deeply unsatisfying in execution. To avoid giving a "political" analysis of literature, you have to segregate the aesthetic from the rest of history, since as soon as you bring history on to the scene, literature looks like another form of political and social writing. To me, accounts that put literature in the context of the wider scene of history are much more convincing and much more critically productive.
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Dylan Perez
Furthermore, how can we isolate the aesthetic from the wider scene of history? I've never seen a real answer to this question. Art has a special value to me in that I often find it profoundly moving. How can I justify making imaginative-objects-that-are-valuable-to-me into a special category distinct from both imaginative-objects-that-are-not-valuable-to-me (bad aesthetic objects) or other historical objects? To this, Bloom might turn to attack me rather than my questions about how he came up with his categories, and say that I was a relativist interested in demolishing the canon and stopping his grandchildren from reading Shakespeare - which of course doesn't at all address the question of the validity of his categorization.
Third, as I said before, while it is true that many critics sought to expand the canon and place greater emphasis on the literature of the oppressed, at no point in time were the central figures of the canon really under attack. I suppose one might make an argument that if we spend a week in class reading Blake, or the Huts of America, that's one less week to spend on Hawthorne, but nobody ever said that canonical authors aren't important. They just said that there was another, at the time largely unread crowd of minority authors that had interesting things to tell us about history, literature, and even aesthetic analysis.
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Caleb Moore
fuck off bitch. i can tell from the first sentence that you haven't read any criticism in your life.
Brandon Lee
i don't think we have as much control over society as you project. what is canon can easily be reduced to ash. look at all of history. the words of the oppressed are the words of the oppressor.
John Mitchell
How do you find these old reddit posts?
Christopher Howard
keep fighting the good fight, OP
Jackson Brown
Approach a piece of art as a surface, not a symbol. That's LITERALLY it.
Stop being such a tryhard faggot in the service of meme bullshit. No, your objections to aestheticism are not nearly as pertinent as you think they are.
Joshua Morris
Stay mad
Brandon Harris
Yeah except it's basically thanks to him that the Romantics began to be taken seriously in academia again after Eliot's cabal ousted them. Thanks
Tyler Nelson
An actually good post OP. It'll be drowned under the shitposts, I'm afraid.
Christian Wright
>reactionary pseud detected, thread hidden this
Angel Bell
It's a post from either /r/literature or /r/askliterarystudies, I can't remember which.
Ayden Wright
fpbp
Carter Wood
U mad fag
Jace Flores
I've read a good criticism of Harold Bloom before. This isn't it.
Jackson Howard
I can tell you haven't either by your response.
Jason Murphy
Literary studies. I used google to confirm this. :^)
Aaron Reed
well, OP, I think your view of Bloom's criticism as an opus is somewhat from the blinkered opposition of the great white male POV
I've only read his Western Canon and a sorter work on Proust, but I find his analysis compelling and well argued. He takes the canon as a body which he defines, and then compares works against his definition. As I understand it his criteria are cultural penetration, character creation and the power of metaphor.
As far as contemporary works he largely takes the view it's too early to tell and I agree in that cultural penetration takes time and let's face it, 99.9999% of books today will be completely ephemeral.
As was Gore Vidal, Bloom is very pessimistic as to the future of literature and sees it's likely to have a imminent expiry date after 400+ years. I feel he believes the future of literature far more threatened by tv social media, www etc and the loss of readers, rather than feminist twaddle.
Justin Bennett
Good posts in a bad thread.
Ryan Turner
I actually had to read Flight to Lucifer for a fantasy course I took in college. The day we were scheduled to discuss it the professor's first question was, 'OK, now, how is Bloom's novel different from the fantasy novels what we've read so far?' A bunch of people raised their hand and answered but none of them seemed to be saying what the professor had in mind. He kept saying, 'Yeah, what else?' Finally nobody had anything to say and he waited a few seconds before saying, 'Well, let me phrase it another way. Was there something in Bloom's novel that eluded you?' Silence. 'Something, perhaps, that you would have liked to see, but didn't? Something that was either absent, or hard to detect?' Ah, of course! My hand shot up. 'Yes, user.' 'Talent,' I said, 'There was no discernible talent!' The professor and I broke out into hysterical laughter. 'You couldn't discern any talent!' 'None!' he shouted and started rolling around on his desk like a turtle on its back. My face was red and I was wiping away tears. We laughed for about five minutes before it died down to nothing but brief aftershocks of giggles. 'Oh man,' he said. 'Good lord. All right. Remember to read the rest of it for Tuesday, and (shouting over everyone packing up) see if you can discern any talent!' And he pointed at me. 'This guy,' he said. 'Woo.'
Cameron Myers
Fucking awful copypasta
Xavier Price
My God, Bloom's prophecy is true. This person attacking him can think and write only in cliches. And this was printed by some respectable periodical, wasn't it? A person with THIS kind of thinking is a "critic"? To appropriate their repulsive cliche, the sky IS in fact falling if this was printed in The New Yorker or whatever. Somebody with a thought process this banal should never have been taught to read.
