Do we excpet Bloom's list of western canon?

Nothing but fish going: "Aah! Fuck!"

*to some US undergrad

>Swedish books are seen with high regard by literature elders
Feels good desu

>James Fenimore Cooper - The Deerslayers
lmfao if the bizarre globalisation of the western canon wasn't bad enough there's always the JFC test to distinguish the true pseud.

it's a classic. worth noting he included multiple things he dislikes because they're influential

Who will we have to protect the canon once he dies?

Carpeaux work on the canon is better and more complete, sadly isn't translated in english so Americans will never read the opinions of a true patrician

holy shit i just read that article. Is that Bloom being legit? I can finally deliver my rightful vengeance on the shitlords I know who disregard his opinion just because of the list.

Re-read the quote.

Brush up on your English, that's not at all what he's saying.

It's not the worst. I mean, coulda included Buzzati, didn't need Grillet's Voyeur, what the fuck are Marlowe's complete works doing there, coulda had less poetry in general, but it's still not the worst. As it progresses it gets worse.

Impossible. Backtracking accusation will always hold. He shot himself in the foot with it, and he's well aware of the fact.

The list really doesn't matter guys, and the only valid criticisms I've seen of it anyway are that it lacks troubadour poetry and some major pre-20th c. lit from non-EFIGS countries

Many early American writers were pretty good: Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper are all wonderful proponents of Romanticism.

Everything he lists is good, though there are some weird omissions, like including Le Guin - acknowledging genre stuff - but not Tolkien. explains stuff like that pretty well though.

who dat

He specifically dislikes Tolkien actually, Lord of the Rings in particular (he thinks The Hobbit is a good book for children, though)

The Brazilian Harold Bloom

Ahhh. How strange.

Here are his opinions on the book

Pretty accurate I'd say, and laudably concise. The connection with the Book of Mormon is an appropriate if unkind parallel to draw. Tolkien admitted what he was doing, Joseph Smith and James McPherson didn't.

He is also right to agree with Sale because its blindly obvious he is correct, and its notable that this something that Peter Jackson removed from the book (class issues). Frodo, Merry and Pippin are all officer class, Sam is Frodo's batman. Its very much a WW1 novel.

No, not that kind of batman.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(military)

Elder JRR is gonna come a-knockin'

How is the book outside of "the list"?

I'm 99% sure Bloom has never read a Cooper book. But like a good pseud he put it on his list anyway.
Y'know I wonder how many of these he actually has read.

Guess ill have have to step up to the task

He's read every book on the list at least twice.

i find that the best list of western canon is greaterbooks.com/

Literally everyone had read Last of the Mohicans, fucking idiot.

This might be fine if it were in chronological order, but alphabetical is just stupid

you're looking at the "master list" page.
i'm talking about the home page

(which is sorted by numbers of mentions in other important lists)

Yeah and he reads 1000 pages an hour. Is there anything you won't believe?

I'm talking about the actual book here not the abridged version.

In that case it's too short. The master list has a lot of fluff on it though, especially the recent stuff most of which is just popular garbage that'll be forgotten 50 years from now

IMO a better list that does the same thing is Charles Murray's from his book Human Accomplishment, though he goes by author rather than work meaning works with anonymous authors are excluded. The list also includes great philosophers, artists, composers, and scientists. Here's a spreadsheet of the 4000 people included:

osf.io/h3867/

This list is better btw because its sources are more credible and it balances them between a variety of different languages (rather than having 99% of them be English like yours)

He was an immigrant from Austria that lived in Brazil and wrote in portuguese a gigantic study/compedium on the western literature, from to greeks hntil the first half of the second century, also:
> major in physics, mathematic and chemistry
>PhD in letters and philosophy
>could speak and read in virtualy all european languages, also latim and ancient greek, so he read everything in the original

Le Guin is very overrated by literary types who use her as their token genre-fiction author

Who would you prefer?

Alfred Bester

As "genre-fiction"? Well obviously Tolkien stands above them all, and Bloom's myopia towards that is just another of the myriad ways his critical faculties fail him. Tolkien's work is hugely important both culturally and in a literary sense, an architect of the highest order, and critics various attempts to downplay him will come of as ridiculous in the future as critics complete dismissal of Melville did in the day. As far as Le Guin goes I think her "Earthsea" series is accomplished children's literature (though can also be enjoyed by adults) but anyone who has read "The Dispossesed" or "The Left-hand of Darkness" can tell even on a prose scale Tolkien far surpasses Le Guin, not to mention his work is far more nuanced and intricate thematically. Bloom's accusation of "moralism" completely misses the mark and shows he doesn't understand the sophistication of Tolkien' s undebased delineation of good and evil, but I'm willing to give him some leeway as Bloom is known not to be a deep reader regarding things outside of his scope of interest and very obvious biases, you should really only read Bloom on Shakespeare and Romantic poetry and so on. Anyway, I think Tolkien is one of the major writers of our epoch and would take him any day over Le Guin but I think the "genre-fiction" distinction is silly and tendentious in the first place. Imagine if Homer's "Odyssey" was published now, would it be classified as genre-fiction?

Gene Wolfe

isn't it just scaruffi in book form?

hell, anyone who has an opinion on a thing is basically scaruffi

Found that book in the library where I work the other day. It was in the closed archives in the basement. It'll properly be thrown out sometime during the next decade.

Mervyn Peake. Tolkienfags who think that lotr is good (not that lotr is bad, but it isn't a masterpiece) because of LeProse® have no idea what good prose is.
Comparing Moby Dick and Lotr is just silly.

>brainlet can't understand LOTR and doesn't realize Tolkien is the Homer of our era and his opinion will be in the dustbin of history

>Tolkien
>the Homer of our era
Almost made me laugh, have a (you).

Neat, I hope that gets translated

he's the christgau of books.
i could draw similarities but its late