INTERVIEWER
What do you make of all this recent talk of the “canonical problem”?
BLOOM
It is no more than a reflection of current academic and social politics in the United States. The old test for what makes a work canonical is if it has engendered strong readings that come after it, whether as overt interpretations or implicitly interpretive forms. There’s no way the gender and power boys and girls, or the New Historicists, or any of the current set are going to give us new canonical works, any more than all the agitation of feminist writing or nowadays what seems to be called African American writing is going to give us canonical works. Alice Walker is not going to be a canonical poet no matter how many lemmings stand forth and proclaim her sublimity. It really does seem to me a kind of bogus issue. I am more and more certain that a great deal of what now passes for literary study of the so-called politically correct variety will wash aside. It is a ripple. I give it five years. I have seen many fashions come and go since I first took up literary study. After forty years one begins to be able to distinguish an ephemeral surface ripple from a deeper current or an authentic change.
>i give it 5 years
>he said this 25 years ago
What went wrong?
>>7741286
he overestimated the normies. the colleges are a breeding ground, and they have yet to be cleansed.
No it came back. There was a rise of PC culture in the mid 80's lasted into the first part of the 90's.
>>7741286
While American PC Culture reeks (IE the current Oscar scandal where blacks are all but saying there must be a black actor voted in to keep everything fair, regardless of quality), things like the Man Booker International are a good thing.
For all that good Harold reads, it mostly seems to be high English. The Man Booker International may well seek to overturn canon as Camus did in the 60s and 70s by showing the American public foreign film, or at least I hope so.
Also, this wave of PCism is dying, see the success of Trump. Without discussing his merits or otherwise, 50% of the United States just wants to shit in the mouth of PC warriors. It is definitely evident of a reaction.
>>7741324
*Not camus, Janus Films. Dunno what I was thinking.
Although it does make me think about the lack of great French works in Blooms canon.
>>7741286
Link to the complete interview?
>>7741385
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-1-harold-bloom
>>7741390
Thanks, brah.
>>7741390
>Our most distinguished living writer of narrative fiction—I don’t think you would quite call him a novelist—is Thomas Pynchon, and yet that recent book Vineland was a total disaster. In fact, I cannot think of a comparable disaster in modern American fiction. To have written the great story of Byron the lightbulb in Gravity’s Rainbow, to have written The Crying of Lot 49 and then to give us this piece of sheer ineptitude, this hopelessly hollow book that I read through in amazement and disbelief, and which has not got in it a redeeming sentence, hardly a redeeming phrase, is immensely disheartening.
lol
>tfw Harold Bloom will die before he gets to read your masterpiece
>>7741402
Anyone have his reaction to Bleeding Edge?
>>7741324
Haven't the Oscars (and Grammys and other awards as well) always been like that though? You know, giving awards to actors who have been "snubbed" in the past, even though their current nomination is shit, "snubbing" others in the process, continuing the cycle?
>>7741449
He's said, I forget where, that Pynchon's later work was interesting, but no where near GR and Col49, of course.
anyone else think bloom looks pretty gangsta here with his necklace and long ass top
is he mellowing on the school of resentment?
>>7741688
Those clothes are just leftovers from when he was a fat fuck
>>7741443
Do you really want him telling you that you have no discernible talent?
>>7741688
y'know that Necklace is a Life Alert thing? he's not too long for this world.
>>7741701
You don't?
>>7741704
No. I don't want to disappoint Bloom.
>>7741709
Why do you think he would expect anything else?
we all know what happened five years later
DISCERNIBLE
FASHION SENSE
>>7741701
yes.
POSTMODERN
MEMES
Bloom is my hero. <3
