>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.
This is such a early 90s discussion. The left has abandoned relativism and has returned to positivism now, hence the fake news hysteria. Bloom can now be welcome again to the left-wing club, which as a Jew he never left.
Alexander Martin
Abolishing the dead white males might not be something academia wants (although a lot of professors actually seem to want that), but it seems like it is what a lot of the liberal students genuinely want, with their petitions and articles.
Also, Bloom is more afraid of the expansion of the canon to include inferior authors simply becuase of their skin color or orientation. He has no problem including POCs and people of different orientation in his literary canon, as he has shown.
Hudson Long
just another piece on the pile of overwrought arguments why we should read inferior works
>naomi wolf surely an impartial source with no ideological vendettas
Caleb Gonzalez
>muh ad hominem
William Myers
ad hominem? she's not giving a logical argument, she is telling a story, and her ideological prejudices and intellectual integrity are directly related to her credibility as story-teller
Samuel Thompson
LITERALLY REDD1T
Mason Garcia
I'm experiencing the shit Bloom is talking about right now. My postmodern class is full of dogshit and my university doesn't give me much in the way of options.
Robert Rivera
The only problem is that people dont know how stupid they are
Grayson Baker
>reactionary This word is to the far left what "cuck" is to the far right. And don't tell me that it's different because it's well-defined. It isn't. It just means anyone who advocates for a specific sort of culture. Guess who does that? Literally everyone with a coherent belief-set. We're all reactionaries, friendo.
As for the non-ad-homenim arguments, a legitimate threat is indeed posed to the dead white male club - the existence of that pejorative proves this. When affirmative-action authors are "given a seat at the table," that seat doesn't materialize out of thin air - it must be taken from an author already being taught. If one text usurps another because it is equal or superior, fine, but if we advocate for works which serve our ideologies rather than those which are aesthetically best, we do a disservice to both art and ideology. Art is degraded when students are taught that mediocrity compares to masterpieces, and ideology suffers because it is championed under a tattered, subpar banner.
I love me some Harlem Renaissance, and they're undeniably excellent, but the school of ressentiment isn't pushing the Harlem Renaissance. They're pushing Maya Angelou (whose poetry is only slightly better than most undergrad English majors). I'd be equally opposed to putting Lovecraft in anything other than an elective.
Mason Torres
The Other Paragraphs Op Left Out (indubitably left out because OP felt he had given this minority writer enough time to shine)
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. TL;DR: Bloom's argument is insubstantial, unscholarly reactionary bluster that relies on illogical categories and an unsatisfying, limited view of history to attack invented adversaries with the seeming intent of stopping professors from reading literature written by minorities.
Camden Moore
History is a limiting force. It is a textual final answer just like the other, more famous one. It must die as well.
Luis Kelly
smart enough to realize we shouldn't prioritize literature based on an ideology you disagree with, not smart enough to realize "aesthetics" are also am ideology.
I don't disagree with the conclusion - that works of art need to live up to a comparable standard, just wanted to point out Bloom's aesthetics are just a different ideology.
Connor Anderson
>this much ressentiment
Logan Edwards
Reactionary generally refers to people who want to roll back change, as opposed to conservatives who want to keep the status quo, and progressives who want to try something different.
It is definitely more defined that the word "cuck"
Brandon Collins
i thought "reactionary" means forces acting in opposition to revolutionary forces i've been reading a lot of marx though
Carter Gray
I've heard it used more and more loosely as of late, so even though it ostensibly only fits "people who want to roll back change," it's been applied to many conservatives and even some progressives. If we go by your definitions, Bloom is a conservative rather than a reactionary, but he's largely referred to as a reactionary. This is why I drew the comparison to "cuck" - ostensibly this word only applies someone who puts broad interest over personal or national interest (a substantial but not all-inclusive group), but this is loose enough to include anyone who doesn't share the speaker's exact ideology.
Bentley Miller
There are a lot of terms that are used differently in different kinds of discourses. Marxists often tend to use terms differently to their more common usage.
But in effect, reactionaries are against progressive change. This still fits within your definition.
