Hey /lit/,
This isn't a death thread. I'd like to know who you guys like or respect. Who's the next great American literary critic? Is there anyone in line behind him?
Serious discussion preferred, but I know you guys won't.
>>7572817
>Who's the next great American literary critic
me
not memeing
me
not memeing either
>>7572833
Have you been published?
>>7572858
yeh but only my prose
>>7572857
fite me fgt
is bloom the last champion of aestheticism we have?
>>7572817
James Wood
>>7572817
There probably won't be anyone to replace him or at least anyone as vocal as him considering the way the universities are going.
>>7572881
Probably. Although if you listen to Bret Easton Ellis' podcast he says "aesthetic" about every third word, so...who knows?
>>7572894
I don't like him.
>>7572894
I think his name comes up the most often when this question gets asked. I should check him out some more.
American public intellectualism died with Buckley and Vidal.
>>7572817
Redpilled guy here.
You shouldn't venerate these academia hacks. Academia is a degenerate institution designed to breed out whiteness
>>7572941
Dazzling rebuttal, old chap.
>>7572947
>people make fun of you
>thinking they're engaging you
aww
>>7572947
Are you surprised at the liberals on /lit/? Most cucked board on 4chan.
They don't even know they're brainwashed
>>7572936
redpill guy, what if this perceived hack is the one that is vehemently attacking the academia?
>>7572957
From my perspective, you're the brainwashed one.
>>7572936
Bloom is pretty much the best friend to your movement in academia today, dumbass.
Google: School of Resentment
>>7572966
They probably hate him because he's a Jew.
>>7572957
>they're brainwashed!!
>can only speak in /pol/ memes
lol nice self awareness
Bloom is the last of the literary critics to say outright that literature is for 'aesthetics'. Not to say that the next big critic will say anything different, but it will be labelled as 'humanism' or something like that.
Bloom, like every human, is both universal and unique. No one will ever truly replace him but there will be another to look up to for sure. My best bet is Gass.
>inb4 it will be a young person under the influence SJWs
>>7572977
Gass is even older than him, dude...
>>7572894
"Like the critic Harold Bloom, Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than more ideologically driven trends that are popular in contemporary academic literary criticism. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson Wood explains that the "novel exists to be affecting...to shake us profoundly. When we're rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that." The reader, then, should approach the text as a writer, "which is [about] making aesthetic judgments.""
I'm quite fine with someone like this talking the helm honestly, even if I might disagree with much of his work. If only he were interested in poetry.
>>7572977
>Gass
He's in his fuckin' 90's...
>>7572977
This. The next one will undoubtedly be brainwashed by the SJW cultural marxism. It's all that's happening in academia these days. Every class is about muh black or muh womy or muh transsexual "oppreshun".
It will be a woman too, no question. And she will say that the canon is racist in an attempt to brainwash the next generation to black literature to ensure that white women will breed with black men and wipe out whiteness
>>7572991
The fact that he never writes about poetry is damning, IMO.
>>7572998
in what sense? damning to him as a critic, or damning to poetry? It's unfortunate for poetry, but more unfortunate for him.
If you meant the latter: people think that it's poets who suffer from declining readership. And that's true, but it's far more the loss of the world.
WHY DO YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT CRITICS EVERY BOOK YOU EVER NEED TO READ IS ALREADY WRITTEN. IF NOT WRITE THE BOOK AND THEY WILL COME IT HAS WORKED LIKE THIS FOR 3000 YEARS KNOW GET OFF /LIT AND READ
>>7573009
I meant him as a critic, though I'm not really a fan of his criticism in the first place, as what I've read of it I haven't found particularly interesting or insightful.
>>7573009
Problem is that there's very little to say anymore about poetry. Apart from a few very unknown and financially unsuccessful, poets are writing in a dead form.
People, galleries and businesses alike have tried to revive poetry, but every single time it turns into "spoken word" or some shit like "my thoughts are on the wall / paint over the solid surface".
(I have enjoyed a lot of this kind of stuff http://muumuuhouse.com/mw.01jan16.html though it is very tao lin and new-age)
>>7573026
I'll admit I've read maybe two or three paragraphs of his criticism at most so I can't agree or disagree. I'll have to wait this out in the other room. The only "critics" I've really had any interest in were DH Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, Ashbery to an extent (he's a bit too embracing of mediocre poets), and to an extent Bloom.
I think Bloom is one of the rare cases of a critic having any useful or interesting insight on poetry or fiction without being a writer or poet himself. Even Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin were artists and writers, Bloom is the only decent critic in history that stands out to me as being good without ever writing a line of literature (other than that failed novel which I don't think was more than a fun saturday night activity for him)
So, here's to hoping that we have more great poets and novelists, and that they speak up on the craft more often.
>>7573019
>believes art can exist without criticism
>he actually believes this
>>7573034
it's not that poetry has "nowhere to go" or that there's "nothing left for poetry", or even that it's a dead form. It's that the culture has been marinated too long in garbage pop consumerism and visual distractions have taken away many readers' attentions spans required to read.
It's not even that new poets are being ignored, it's that old, established, canonical poets are being ignored as well. We are actively destroying all interest in our own cultural foundations.
There are a few good poets writing today (what you linked me wasn't poetry at all -- it's hard for me to say it, but compared to that garbage, even the confessional poetry of Lowell and Sexton looks fantastic) besides the obscurist Ashbery. The problem is just that poetry has been consumerized like all the other art forms -- MFA mills are really to blame -- and so the vast majority of poets who haven't the intelligence nor knowledge to commit the act of experimentation are, at least in their minds, "experimenting", which basically means that they're writing formless poetry about banal subjects and without any semblance of poetics, and slapping "but I'm from an MFA" and "well Lacan says..." to back it up academically.
And I'm not bitter about "visual distractions" completely. I love film. Film is facing the same problems, though there are many good directors still alive, like Mamat and Mallick.
Even in the past two decades we've seen great directors like Kieslowski (even though I'm not a fan of him I respect him) reach their creative peaks. And yet film is suffering from the same consumerism with the likes of Tarantino and Anderson sucking up any good attention to film history or good directors now still filming.
Probably a long rant post, but oh well, who cares, I'm anonymous. Either way I'm looking forward to when India and China completely overtake Europe and the US economically and culturally. Indians and Chinese people actually read.
>>7573074
Hope u don't mean Wes Anderson, b/c I luff him...
>>7573090
I do mean Wes Anderson, and also when I said Mamat I meant Mamet. I googled Mamat because it didn't sound right to me, and some fat retard director came up. Oops. So pretend I said Mamet.
>>7573074
>Either way I'm looking forward to when India and China completely overtake Europe and the US economically and culturally. Indians and Chinese people actually read.
I was with you until there. Now you're fuckin' dropped.
>>7573102
>I was with you until there. Now you're fuckin' dropped.
They actually do read though, on average, at least twice as much per week as the average American and nearly that much more than the average European.
Though sure, I overstepped my daydreams a bit there. But we can hopefully both agree that consumerist culture can only be destroyed by adversity to our cultural centers.
>>7573101
Moonrise Kingdom was the comfiest movie I've ever soon tho
>>7573113
it's also pretty much exactly like every single other of his movies, barring maybe Bottle Rocket. He has directed what is essentially the same movie over and over half a dozen times.
>>7573106
Meh. I disagree. I think consumerism culture is a good thing. But I'm a capitalist and I don't want to have that discussion here.
>>7573121
Nothing wrong with sticking with what you do best. I only like 3 of his movies anyway (Rushmore, Tenenbaums, MK)
>>7573127
> and I don't want to have that discussion here.
Neither do I, because I'm approaching the topic from the viewpoint of an artist (poet wannabe / director wannabe) and not from a political or economic one. So perhaps I'm as naive as Ezra Pound was when he made butt buddies with Mussolini and Hitler even after America joined the war.
I suppose my gripe comes from how democratic literature study has become in schools. Kids should be, even in public schools, required to read a book a week, and memorize five poems a school year. This isn't much to ask, and while many would hate it, it would introduce enough to actual literature and poetry to keep everything alive. But schools only care about employing their students by making sure all the AP Computer Science and AP Physics C classrooms are consistently stocked.
Oh well. I want to be a poet, and I want to be a director. It'd be a crime if I weren't naive.
>>7573074
eh, they're not perfect and both tend to repeat themselves with regard to their later output, but i think tarantino and anderson have put out worthwhile work. tarantino's pastiche sensibility provides a view at the history of cinema through his distinctive eye, and anderson is a wonderful visual stylist which sometimes reaches levels of poignancy.
wouldn't you say the bigger problem is endless sequels and capeshit bockbusters, so middle-of-the-road in their every sensibility that one film blurs into the next?
>>7573146
>wouldn't you say the bigger problem is endless sequels and capeshit bockbusters, so middle-of-the-road in their every sensibility that one film blurs into the next?
Sure, but that's really just unfixable at this point. The market has always been there, and unfortunately it's expanded to being unkillable. A movie that's guaranteed to make 1 billion upon release from a 200 million budget is unkillable as an enterprise. That's permanent.
And sure, I'm being a bit harsh with Tarantino and Anderson, but I think I'm just mad at how much of the film market they've clogged out. That is, capeshit takes 90 percent of the market, but middling directors like Tarantino and Anderson who get followings (themselves unkillable at this point, maybe a decade after both die they'll dissipate) and take up another huge portion of the remaining market. It'd be fine if they were still making good movies. Both debuted rather well, but both are laughably horrible now (Tarantino far worse than Anderson).
Capeshit just kind of fills the void for people who weren't going to read or take literature seriously anyways (the intellectual underclass who refuses to have to think about what they consume or enjoy. Which is honestly fine, because this has always comprised the large majority of any society.)
>>7573167
you make fair points and i too lament the fact that so many 'film buffs' focus all of their attention on directors like anderson and tarantino instead of delving deeper into the artform and engaging with more challenging and distinctive filmmakers. i enjoy their work nonetheless and will defend it when i can, but i agree it's a shame they take up so much of the marketplace for 'film buffs' when more attention could be focused elsewhere.
>>7573167
(alright, I'll add to my post: I'll let up on Anderson a bit. I strongly dislike him but now that I think about it, even though he's mediocre, he IS keeping the market open for other possibly intelligent directors. He's like a gateway drug to actually good directors, and I think enough people who watch him become interested in the history of film and explore. Tarantino on the other hand is just a dead end, very few who get into him explore any further.)
So Anderson is the type of film director that's similar to say, Philip Larkin is to poetry. Both mediocre, but it gets people interested.
>>7573210
well, I think "buffs" in most mediums now are like that. I've met many "poetry buffs" who talk endlessly about the Romantic poets and don't know who, say, Hart Crane is, or Paul Celan, or don't know the significance of Garcia Lorca, or have just read "Prufrock" and called it a day with Eliot, or just read Canto I of Ezra Pound and said "well that's all I need from him", or call WC Williams the best poet ever, or get mad when a poem doesn't have an explication on eNotes online. Same with fiction: "My favorite books are Lolita, Gravity's Rainbow, and The Trial."
But I think we both know cinema buffs are far worse. It's a shame.
Susan McVeslie. Mark my words, it will be so.
>>7573230
Pls stop describing /lit/, it's painful
>>7573106
Aren't we in the process of watering down our movie industry just so it's easier to translate for Asian audiences? To further facilitate mindless consumption?
>>7573238
I wouldn't know much about that. I assume it's more pertinent with the "capeshit" we discussed in >>7573167 to an extent.
I think it's really not a problem that there's garbage out there, it's that it's soaked up the room for everything else. There's always been garbage, but it's taken the place of actual culture because 1) consumerism is forced on us, and those that reject it are immediately rebuked as social pariahs, 2) education in schools is focused on getting jobs and not actual learning. Literature and Poetry and Film history and the Arts are far more important to learn about than Calculus, UNLESS the focus is to get people ready to work in industry, retire at age sixty-five, consume garbage TV and Capeshit on the weekends, and die having read tons of comics and three actual books in their lifetimes.
Back to your point, I'm not sure how the Asian market influences the "middlebrow" and "highbrow" film production fronts. Feel free to educate me. I'm not being sarcastic either.
>>7573254
>Literature and Poetry and Film history and the Arts are far more important to learn about than Calculus
Fuck this. Math is beautiful
>>7573269
> Fuck this. Math is beautiful
That's fine and all, but we know that almost nobody who aches to learn Calculus in high school is doing it because they love math, it's to get out of a few credits of college so that you don't have to take Calc I/II at a university where they'll attempt to weed you out with a C or lower.
I don't have anything against math or the sciences, but they're not being taught for any reason other than to appease parents who want little Billy to work in IT or Google or in a lab somewhere.
t. someone who enjoys science and got an 800 math SAT, so I'm not some "liberal arts fuckup"
>>7573306
>almost nobody who aches to learn Calculus in high school is doing it because they love math
If you changed "aches" to "wants" and "loves" to "likes" it would certainly not be true.
>>7573321
how many of them become math majors?
>>7573327
How so?
>>7573254
Unfortunately, I can't educate you on that because I don't even remember where those articles are.
Coincidentally, your post is somewhat painful to me. I am currently brushing up on my math and code monkeying skills because I have decided that being able to move out of my parents' house, to retain my sanity, is more important than any artistic pursuits. At the same time, I've already alienated all my old friends who still enjoy video games and other types of soma. Every interaction is embarrassing and every decision is wrong. I have no further insights to share, and probably never will.
>>7573306
>800 math SAT
everyone gets an 800 math SAT though (i am assuming you are talking about the SAT 2.) the curve is so generous that one can get 6 problems wrong and still get a perfect score.
>>7573423
well no I was talking about the general SAT, where an 800 is still a small accomplishment (99th percentile-ish iirc). Not that I'm bragging about it, just saying that I'm not mad at math or anything because I'm bad at it.
>>7572894
he's good, but oh so dry
