User, I'm so glad you can take the time to visit me and help around the house

He didn't even want to make the list in the first place

In the Acknowledgements section in his Shakespeare: Invention of the human book, he recommends Arden and Riverside.

He also says the New Oxford Shakespeare "perversely speaks, more often than not, to print the worst possibly text, poetically speaking."

Just read Genius you turbopleb

Yes, but he's recommending those to plebs. You think he needs all those notes and annotations?

i did, it sucked. you seem to have not.

it's the problems of his western canon combined (too narrow, not developed enough)

bloom does not want his readers to be as knowledgable as him, so he publishes books where he can blather on without consequences.

he does. they're good comprehensive and useful. i love the arden series.

bloom's read more Shakespearean criticism than i ever will, and i can completely understand why.

>I knew him well, a fellow of infinite bloom

Will Harold's skull be used in a Hamlet performance after his death?

Maybe the first dozen times he read the plays. I'm sure he doesn't read those annotations anymore.

has fryes's? don't be a retard

its reasonable to assume he has them on shelf for the occasional digging when a clever student points out something he previously missed. i haven't touched my annotations on paradise lost in a while but i definitely revisit them because there's always something to learn or revisit.

you're right I haven't, I did like the kabbalistic chart though :^)

Who the fuck is Fryes?

it comes with boogers when you order at macdoogals

Northrop Frye.

>print the worst possibly text, poetically speaking
I don't get it. They print the exact same text.

they do not

many of the plays dont have a single defined text and vary greatly depending on which source version (first folio, quatro, etc.) version you're going off of. many modern editions nitpick over thing ranging from single words in a line to entire scenes when deciding which edition of the text they want to print

try actually reading either, you fucking idiot.

different editions of shakespeare have various punctuation, but oxford fucks things up by changing entire words from authoritative versions of texts, more than just spelling variants. with that kind of editorial bullshit happening, it's no wonder america currently has the world's leading universities.

...

>tfw he's probably not going to get to read Gene Wolfe before he dies
>tfw Wolfe will die soon too

jesus, man

bloom has heard of tolkien and le guin. he almost assuredly knows of g wolfe, since he does know of crowley, another genre writer considered literary. he might have even read him.

...

This upset me.

Actually it's pretty fucking amazing that he's still lucid at nearly 90 years old.

I remember Gadamer and Ricoeur lived to some insane shit like 90-100 too and were still pretty productive until the end.

>bloom is going to die within your lifetime

I remember reading interviews where he says he'll read anything and everything, but they're a bit old, and Bloom's reading speed has decreased severely over time. It might be that Bloom now just wants to use his free time reading stuff he knows he likes.

Bloom will be missed.

It's a life-alert, not a necklace :(

:(

:(

he looks thin and sad

It's especially sad when you hear old accounts of how energetic he used to be teaching.

The only record I could get of "young" Bloom is this video of him filmed for a PBS documentary of American poets.
youtube.com/watch?v=fLBXe3z9zx8

audible has a class he taught on shakespeare it's p dank

If he knew about Wolfe he would have mentioned him.

You never know. With a bit of luck, you could die first.

Thank you, user.

>Don't let the canon fade away.

Bloom is a key propagater of the biggest literary spook known to man, the """canon"""

Not if you kill yourself today!

This claim does not follow.

Bloom never directly mentions Asimov, yet if he knew of LeGuin and Tolkien, he assuredly knew of Asimov, as Asimov was also famous for being a public intellectual within Bloom's time, and since they shared a common state.

He probably hits that life-alert every time he reads a sublime passage and reads it aloud to the EMT's when they show up thinking he's having a heart attack.
>oh I'm so glad you've arrived, you all must this passage from Joyce's exquisite novel Ulysses, the chapter Oxen of the Sun. gather around, it is truly sublime

>tfw since you first read Shakespeare you knew that there would only be one thing you would ever truly love: Literature. You study it all your life, working through the wonders of Shelly, Yeats, Joyce, Dante. You you strive for the highest accreditation possible for your passion, and decide that you will nurture the minds of the next generation of great writers at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. You teach the best and brightest, knowing one day the next Proust, the next Tolstoy, the next Dickens will pass into your hands; you'll see that spark of genius and nurture it, teach it the wonders of hamlet and king leer. Yet the years go by and you never see it. The quality of students is steadily diminishing, they've read less and less, you begin to lose hope. Relentlessly time marches on. You see the bookstore you used to go to as a child close down, you see the internet eat away at peoples attention, and still the next great literary figure has yet to emerge. You begin to think that you wont be around to see it, but take solace that the institutions of higher learning will persevere. Yet the years go by and the institutions begin to change around you, your school is slowly taken over by those who care not for aesthetic value, who care not for the western cannon, who care only for the race and gender of the author. The foundations of education are crumbling before your eyes. You realise that the institutions will no longer be able to nurture that genius, so you decide to compile a list of the greatest works of literature ever written; a guide to help them break their own path. Yet the days go by and people are reading less and less, Harry Potter replaces The Wind in the Willows, the dreams of your youth utterly crushed. Your body is slowly giving way, the many years wearing you down, atrophy taking your strength. It's hard to hold a book still any more, Those poems you memorised in your youth are growing harder to recall. You take comfort in your copies of Shakespeare, remembering that time when you first fell in love. A small flame of optimism warms you as you reminisce; at least Shakespeare will be around forever, surely he will inspire the next generation as he inspired you. Then you see, at your own university, english students demanding that Shakespeare be dropped from the syllabus. That last candle of optimism flickers and dies, leaving only a void of misery. Your strength seeps still, it's getting hard to walk, your eye sight is getting worse. Your hands shake too much while holding a book for you to read, so you have to rest them on a table. Yet it is painful to to sit in one place for too long, transforming your once beloved pastime into a trial of agony. Your mind is slowing, its hard to concentrate anymore, your thoughts and memory are cloudy, yet one feeling stays crystal clear: A deep existential sorrow at the state of your beloved: That you lived to see the death of that which you held most dear.

I rather have useful applicable technology at the expense of the masses attention span than this garbage "only old things are good" you circlejerk so much about.

>it's an autistic stemdrone who only knows how to think in memes
You people are really the end of a civilization. It's not about valuing old things but the good, the true and the beautiful.

You call me these things and then proclaim im the one speaking in memes. Separating nostalgia from objective discussion is needed to fully apreciate aesthetics.

Was Bloom right about DFW?:

"You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But ‘Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent."

"I was upset when the National Book Award gave Stephen King a special award in 2003, but Stephen King is Cervantes compared to David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left."

"Wallace seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him. I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest.’"

>"only old things are good"
Even if every year produced the same amount of equally great literature, 99% of the best stuff would still be from before you were born.

Im not attacking bloom's attempts to push the canon, im attacking the nigger using greentext to make bloom sound like an angsty teenager because "everything sucks now"

The world changes, we will probably eventually stop using books as a whole since everything will be digital and every single definition will be its own hyperlink handholding you through the process, like wikipedia does now, like many e-readers and google already do. I bet some bitch cried when we stopped using tablets and went for papyrus.

Can't wait until that troglodyte dies. Have you even read his "novel"? No wonder he disowned it, he can't write. Only a pseud would listen to anything he says.

Which one?

I've read the Western Canon and it was great.

That was really well-written, but to be honest, literature isn't so important as we think it is. I've read almost all of Shakespeare and many of the "classics" and ultimately come to the conclusion that yes, "plebeians" are right, common sense and living one's life is more important than being obsessed with art.

Everyone knows he just hates it because DFW made a joke about him in endnote 366.

...

DELETE THIS

I doubt he'll ever truly be gone. His ghost will come back to haunt us and whisper his favourite lines from Othello in our ears and complain about popular fiction.

>western canon
>novel