Harold Bloom negs every writer who isn't Shakespeare
He just wants to keep the canon from becoming pozzed.
Bloom is basically a condom for the canon. Let's hope he doesn't break/die any time soon.
>>8090892
I was surprised at how highly he valued Freud.
He does what now?
Just realized the potential phallic punning on the word "canon" (homophone of "cannon")
>>8090921
He subtly makes them feel inferior to Shakespeare so he can fuck them
>>8090911
Any person who has read Freud with a brain values Freud
>>8090928
Sadly there was no Freud with a brain.
>>8090910
>>8090930
ooooooooooooooooh
>>8090892
Seriously? I feel like you've never read the book if you believe that he discredits anyone who isn't Shakespeare.
>>8090936
Maybe not quite willfully but when each chapter is laced with "but Shakespeare did it better" rhetoric, its kind of hard to overlook the fact that, rather than Proust or Macbeth, Bloom is in fact the character most significantly afflicted with Freudian 'sexual' jealousy in the whole book. Clearly, Its easier for him to live without artistic pretensions when he can reduce the talent all around him to a point of singularity that happily encompasses and resorbs the entire category of 'the written word' itself. We all know about his less than stellar foray into novelizing, so his desire to at least sit on the stoop of the pantheon can't be ignored. Bloom's ridiculous fallacy can be seen plain as day in lines like "it is both and neither, as is always the case with Shakespeare." He makes Shakespeare whatever he needs him to be to make his point. Can Shakespeare form a rock so massive even he himself cannot lift it? Well the Schroedinger's Shakespeare of Bloom's convenience surely can. Its just too silly
And I don't mean to say anything about Shakespeare who is certainly an unassailable figure in spite of whatever Bloom's preoccupations may or may not be. But to essentially begrudge every writer their individual worth by explicitly painting them as mere epigones to one man seems so preposterous that I can't help but impute some agenda here.
>>8091033
>trying to attack papa Bloom
Pathetic desu
>>8091086
Got any arguments besides Japanese meme filters?
>>8090928
>Freud ... the greatest essayist since Montaigne
Only proves that there's no such thing as a universal canon. There are only personal canons.
shakespeare invented the human senpai
>>8091341
Which essayist would you pick?
>>8090910
I think this is the best simile I've ever read on /lit/
>>8091430
This is the least educated person on /lit/.
>>8091164
He doesn't because he's a pseud with no answer in hand
Bloom is a meme
I'm still stuck in the intro where he builds and then rants about the strawman of "muh SJW academia", if I want to read that shit I come here
>>8091809
I skipped the intro, I recommend starting from chapter 3 (Dante), then read 1-2, then read in normal order.
>>8091818
That's a good recommendation, cheers!
I also highly recommend Marcel Reich-Ranicki's essays, that guy had a similar role to Bloom in German literary culture with less of a fixation on the "greats". He was also much nicer than Bloom, less ranting. Not sure how much has been translated into English.
>>8091809
It's not a strawman. He's obviously correct.
>>8091809
do it man. just do it.
Shakespeare's pretty great desu.
The only part of the book that even matters is the invective against SJW-infested academia. The rest is just Bloom saying how everyone's not as good as SHakespeare.
>>8091341
Whether you agree with Freud or not, he changed how we read literature for the better half of the 20th Century. Bloom passed his canon off his own reading, but that doesn't mean he didn't think about anyone else's.
>>8091884
>im autistic and a whiny baby coward who refuses to read anything that goes against my extremely fragile point of view waaaaaah
>>8091809
>strawman
Nobody of intelligence actually believes pervasive Marxist sentiment that expurgates all opposing viewpoints is anything but a grotesque ramifying disease. The Marxists on /lit/ merely adhere to the idea that one may remain on the left in spite of it. /pol/ is the knee jerk reaction to languishing in an Adornian system of ressentiment where everything is bad is good
>>8091809
>>8093699
But the antipodal measure-for-measure ridiculousness of /pol/'s rhetoric should not lead one to the fatuous idea that the other side might be correct. That's the kind of bad-faith thinking that is the lifeblood of partisan politics. Its how a political affiliation becomes a brand rather than a philosophical idea. Its how a corporate goon and warmonger like Obama can receive a Nobel Peace Prize to the applause of millions of faux-leftist loonies like yourself.
Thank you
>>8091033
>He makes Shakespeare whatever he needs him to be to make his point.
In a vulgar attempt at "critique," you assess Bloom negatively for his dynamic appraisal of the value of Shakespeare, no doubt with the goal of showing Bloom's slavish idolatry of the "dead white male" par excellence. While Bloom's canon, no doubt, does tend to err on the side of phallic and European, I think it is far more productive to, rather than ask what psychosexual abnormality in Bloom causes him to read Shakespeare in such a way, ask what is it about Shakespeare that permits such a panoply of apparently contradictory readings? How can it be that this poet and playwright forms the tabula rasa upon which not only any number of (as you argue) instrumental critiques can be inscribed, but indeed upon which the entire Western canon can be heaped and judged as though his corpus were a one-sided scale of blind justice?
>>8093699
Social Justice has very little to do with Marxism, and everything to do with French post-structuralism. Many people in academia are far more convinced nowadays, thanks mostly to de Man and Derrida, by the latter, leaving the actual collective praxis advocated by the former to grope in an intellectual darkness into which it has been plunged by the likes of you.
>>8090911
He doesn't value Freud for his psychology if that's what you're thinking. It's kind of like how people will do a Freudian analysis of Shakespeare, he does the exact opposite.
>>8093835
No, I am about as offensively right wing as one can possibly be; partly in acknowledged bad-faith and out of sheer spite for the cultural milieu I deign to continue living within. I just think he has taken the idolatry to such an exaggerated point that it strains credulity. I think maybe some of the other dead white males should get unconditional sunlight as well.
>>8093835
Shit me, I just fell for bait
>>8090928
pseud detected.
>>8093849
Actually it just came from the civil rights movement going too far and turning into race and gender-based chauvinism. It doesn't have anything to do with these ivory tower pseudo-philosophers
>>8093952
Wrong.
>>8090910
This metaphor is a microcosmos of why the West™ is dying.
>>8094777
Actually I'm right.
>>8091033
he explicitly says that Ibsen was the better dramatist and at no point does he ever withhold praise on account of "Shakespeare being better"
he does (rightly) place Shakespeare in the heart of the canon, but the only times he comes close to doing what you suggest is when he discusses Joyce's passage in Ulysses revealing his own grave fear that he was an inferior Shakespeare
>>8095032
What? No, he criticizes Joyce for saying that while calling the assertion "absurd" and subtly suggesting it was just a defense mechanism of Joyce in order to diminish Shakespeare. Whether or not he pats a few writers on the back the book is offensively centered around Shakespeare for someone who wants a balanced and unalloyed presentation of the Canon in its entirety. Worse yet are the divagations to 'Freud saids'
>>8093699
>Adorno
>"everything bad is good"
Have you even read Aesthetic Theory or his books on music criticism? Adorno was an enormous elitist and a big defender of traditional (and even bourgeois) art.
I'm so sick of the Le Cultural Marxism maymay, it's a red flag that reveals that whoever utters that phrase doesn't actually read, to excellent precision.
>>8095065
Adorno favoured Schoenberg over Stravinsky. You can defend the 'bad' and aesthetically uncanny under the banner of elitism. How do you think we got in this mess to begin with?
Have a link to the books Bloom listed as part of the canon:
http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html
>>8095047
hm i thought he gave the statement more credence than that, but its been a while
regardless, there are entire sections with hardly a mention of shakespeare (notably the novelists, goethe, dickens, eliot) you act like his reading of shakespeare is some poison which contaminates the entire book, but how many authors does he really criticize for their inferiority to shakespeare? (or from whom does he withhold praise on account of shakespeare)
>>8095016
it's the result of leftists needing to build an elaborate theoretical apparatus in order to reject the reality of behavioral and mental differences between the races and genders.
How did Shakespeare invent human consciousness again?
>>8095084
I checked and there isn't a single chapter without a reference to Shakespeare or one or more of his works
>>8095073
Aesthetically uncanny does not universally equal bad. And one example doesn't discredit Aesthetic Theory, or The Culture Industry, or Prisms, Notes to Literature, The Philosophy of New Music, Searching For Wagner, Composing Music For Films, or any of the number of works he's written that people who perpetuate the Le Cultural Marxism maymay on the internet have not actually read.
The phrase "Cultural Marxism" is itself nonsensical and it could only be parroted by someone who actually hasn't read Marx. I say this as a reactionary.
>How do you think we got in this mess to begin with?
Definitely not by the unwashed masses reading Adorno, nor by a conspiracy taken up by Adorno to brainwash said unwashed masses, mostly due to the fact that nobody fucking read Adorno, including the memelords who have recently tried to turn him into a Marxist SJW bogeyman. Furthermore, Marxism is so far removed from modern day SJW leftism that there's almost no resemblance besides a vague, impotent ressentiment towards capitalism and towards success within capitalism. These are memes perpetuated by the uneducated.
>>8095073
That's a pretty drastic misreading. Adorno saw them each as continuing the disintegration of the sonata.
>>8095105
Actually they don't need to do that, they can just call you a racist.
>>8095133
I think the main boogeyman is Horkheimer actually, probably because he was head of the Institute for Social Research when it moved to the United States.
Harold Bloom is simply a Freudian T.S. Eliot (the critic, not the poet).
The book is actually surprisingly unprofessional all around. Given that the book is called 'The Western Canon' one would expect a series of well-composed expository critical essays. Instead its really just an old smart man rambling at length about whatever the fuck he wants with the author's and works acting as talking points. In 'Elegy For The Canon" it seems sensible to rant about politically motivated academics. In an article on Beckett it just comes across as vulgar. I honestly wonder if he was occasionally drunk while he wrote this.
>>8097758
""""unprofessional"""" is a meme
>>8091809
eshthrowmane
Does Bloom have anything to say about Homer?
>>8097809
He has a few pages on Homer in his book Genius.
>>8097820
How does he defend Homer having such a small part in his analysis of western literature?
>>8097833
Probably because he didn't want to talk about more than 26 authors, and had to exclude a few very important ones.
>>8097833
He doesn't include the Bible either.
Here are the 100 authors Bloom writes about in Genius.
>>8097857
>the Bible
>Western
>>8097863
wtf is this occultist bullshit
>>8097882
moron
>>8097957
>including a Jewish fairy tale in an essay book about the WESTERN canon
moron
>>8097863
>nietzche
>understanding
>twain
>eternity
>muhammad
>saint paul
>freud
>plato
>wisdom
>>8097895
Bloom loves that Gnostic/Kabbalbleh crap.
