http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-massive-list-of-works-in-the-western-canon.html
I know that you guys disagree in some way with Harold Bloom's list. What did he forget? What shouldn't be on there?
>>8286309
>What shouldn't be on there?
The Americas aren't Western.
>>8286309
>What shouldn't be on there?
Women and nonwhites. Faggots too. Bye-bye Proust. You're not welcome in a redpilled canon.
>>8286309
>Vice: I was hoping to talk first about The Western Canon.
>Harold Bloom: Do you mean the whole category, or what I wrote about it?
>I mean your book.
>But can we make an agreement? Let’s forget that damned list.
>Ha. Do you mean the appendix in the back of the book that lists all the canonical works?
>The list was not my idea. It was the idea of the publisher, the editor, and my agents. I fought it. I finally gave up. I hated it. I did it off the top of my head. I left out a lot of things that should be there and I probably put in a couple of things that I now would like to kick out. I kept it out of the Italian and the Swedish translations, but it’s in all the other translations—about 15 or 18 of them. I’m sick of the whole thing. All over the world, including here, people reviewed and attacked the list and didn’t read the book. So let’s agree right now, my dear. We will not mention the list.
>>8286309
>What did he forget?
Discernible talent.
>>8286350
Bloom basically confirms here that the liberal publishing industrial machine forced him to include politically correct authors to appease their ideology.
>>8286350
What an absolute madman.
>>8286358
(You)
>>8286373
>liberal fool detected
>>8286350
Woolf confirmed forced in by marxists.
What's your guys' opinion on Dracula being there?
>>8287503
kek, nothing more
Am I a liberal fool if I think the list is ok?
>>8287503
It doesn't make sense, I don't think Bloom put it there willingly, It's quite well-known for having literally zero aesthetic value.
>>8286358
It's a pretty standard list. Are you mad Evola was not included or something?
>>8287518
If you think the women and POC people in there deserve to be there, then yes
>>8286357
underrated post
List is reductive, like all lists.
Jean Toomer ought to be on there instead of Dreiser. Beckett, Faulkner, and Mann should be represented. Might make a case for Mikhail Bulgakov as well. Whitman instead of Emerson or Thoreau, you pick.
>>8287503
Book probably doesn't deserve it on its own merits, but a lot of people see it as the thematic precursor to early 20th century German Expressionism, particularly in film (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari comes to mind).
>>8287550
And then you hit Angels in America.
Why does anyone give a shit about Bloom again?
You guys talk about him even more than David Foster Wallace.
>>8287559
Because we know of him and his ideas are laid out for all to se in his many, many books. It's for convenience sake more than anything. We need some authority to guide us, and he is around so..., why not.
>Western Cannon
>Le Guin
>Rushdie
Reads like a ad from his publisher.
>>8287559
we don't know any other critics
>>8287594
yea, this.
>>8287587
Midnight's Children won the Booker, and then was named the Booker of Booker's twice after that. It will be a part of the western canon for centuries.
>>8287789
>Midnight's Children is a 1981 book by Salman Rushdie that deals with India's transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of British India.
>Western Canon
Fucking pick one you shitlib faggot
>>8287594
This place could be better with more Marcel Reich-Ranicki discussions, but then again, almost nothing of his stuff was translated into English.
More erudite than Bloom, less of a contrarian asshole (yet still contrarian, just not much about muh liberal university culture destroys everything), deeply involved in the German literature scene of the 60s to 90s. Clive James (who isn't discussed much here either) adores Reich-Ranicki.
>>8287797
He's a diasporic writer. The novel (a western format) deals with India in dialogue with both the West and East, investigating orientalist aesthetics. Rushdie was educated and lived in UK from his childhood onward. His writing belongs to the western tradition, even if he does try to incorporate oriental content.
It's also written in English.
>>8287820
Western canon-
about the West, from the West
by the West, for the West
According to you, if a street shitter learns English and writes in "western format" it's eligible to be canonical. You're robbing both our culture and theirs with this stupid shit.
>>8286350
Post your best Bloom Pasta
>The eBook...I recently went through my first, and last, eBook experience, on which I read a 50th rate thriller by the overrated Michael Crichton called Timeline. By pressing a button I was able to read through the book and I found it to be not a good experience. Whether in terms of the quality of what I was reading, or the ghastly procedure in which I was following.
>>8287851
>implying Indian culture is not interwoven with English colonial culture
>implying there's a strict delineation between both "ours" and "theirs"
>implying you're not an memester from /pol/
>>8287865
Not him, but
DESIGNATED.
Come back when you can poo in loo.
>>8287851
Wew. I responded to you in good faith only to find out you're fucking retarded. I'm so disappointed.
>>8287851
>from the west
>not Western.
>>8287878
Seiryoin can speak english. Hell, he's translating stuff from Japanese to English on his own English imprint.
If he wrote a book in English and it was first printed by his English imprint, it wouldn't make said book any less Japanese.
>>8287891
Rushdie lives in UK, speaks with an English accent, writes in English, is only nominally an Indian writer. Was born in Bombay, the most English part of India, and the most internationalized. I think it's pretty retarded to not call Midnight's Children, which was even and written and published first in UK, as part of western literature. It's at the very least a cross over, and can't really be considered entirely Indian.
Anyway, the argument's pointless now in the global world. Anything from anywhere can be considered part of the canon.
>>8287868
>thinking he can defend a retarded post by citing age-old memes
>implying I'm even Indian
Son, what are you doing with your limited time on earth
>>8287909
>It's at the very least a cross over
Well, at least you can accept it's not entirely wester-
>the argument's pointless now in the global world. Anything from anywhere can be considered part of the canon.
Holy marxism, Batman.
Goddamn commie subjectivists. If your argument is that nothing means anything because everything is everything, just don't bother arguing.
>>8287913
Having fun.
They call it funposting for a reason.
>>8286350
But that list is the only worthwhile thing he ever wrote! I'll keep using it, it serves a purpose, and I never took the post-war American inclusions seriously anyway - how can lasting merit be predicted?
>>8287820
>languages belong to certain cultures and no other is allowed to use them
>>8287937
Someone with your comprehension skills shouldn't be on /lit/, you need to start with picture books. Come back in a few years, champ.
>>8287940
>marxism isn't bad
>>>/r/eddit is that way.
Come back when one of your experiments doesn't crash and burn into economic mayhem and genocide.
>>8287950
You sure showed us.
>>8287945
>The west has a monopoly on English
>>>/r/eddit
>>8286309
So it's all fiction except for the non-fiction that you would read as a literature major, e.g. Augustine is there but Boethius and Aquinas are not.
Now the thing is, I'm sure Bloom has read Boethius and Aquinas. So why didn't he include them? Because they're not "literary" enough, i.e. they're not the kind of things "literary people" read, regardless of the fact that those were two of the most important writers of their day.
>>8287940
You know when the only way to defend your philosophy is to tell everyone to ignore every single time in history it's been implemented, it's a good sign that there's something questionable about your philosophy.
>>8286309
He snubbed Robert Burns
what the fuck
>>8287981
Are you that stupid? No one has implied anything of the sort.
>>8287997
>>8287950
>>8287918
>Implying that marxism is communism
>Implying communism is marxism
>implying that marxism has been 'implemented'
>implying that all communist states are better off economically and socially after ending communist rule and weren't better off after becoming communist to begin with
>implying any of this has anything to do with Salman Rushdie's status as a western author, or Harold Bloom's book.
>implying saying anything can be part of the canon now if its a novel written in English has something to do with marxism
>>8288013
>>8288013
Right, Midnight's Children is written in English, by someone with an English accent, who lives in England and has lived in England since childhood, who is UK citizen, writes in a western format, for a western audience, but his books can't be considered western?
Obviously no one has a monopoly of English, but everything adds up.
>>8288023
>>Implying that marxism is communism
>>Implying communism is marxism
>>implying that marxism has been 'implemented'
Communism is a political implementation of marxist political and economic theories.
>>implying that all communist states are better off economically and socially after ending communist rule and weren't better off after becoming communist to begin with
You mean like Russia and East Germany?
Yes, absolutely. Much, much better economically than back when they were under communism.
>>implying any of this has anything to do with Salman Rushdie's status as a western author, or Harold Bloom's book.
>>implying saying anything can be part of the canon now if its a novel written in English has something to do with marxism
Never implied. The marxism discussion stemmed from this post >>8287918 (You), which was refuting a retarded marxist subjectivist globalist post that said
>the argument's pointless now in the global world. Anything from anywhere can be considered part of the canon.
and thus deserved to be disregarded as marxist drivel.
Fucking pinkos and their sophistry.
>>8288047
wogs go home
we got brexit now u can fuck offI enjoyed Midnight's Children
>>8288066
>Communism is a political implementation of marxist political and economic theories.
Communism is a political system which Marx advocated strongly for, incorporating his own theory into. Marx didn't invent the idea for communism, nor the name. It existed as an idea before Marx.
>Communism is a political implementation of marxist political and economic theories.
Russia is still a shit hole and many Russians don't see much qualitative difference in their lives since the fall of the USSR. But this is beside the point, it wasn't relevant to any of the discussion.
Because:
That introduced marxism into the thread, completely irrelevantly, your post. You weren't refuting anything Marxist, because nothing Marxist was said. Again, you demonstrate your lack of comprehension.
Anything will become part of the canon now, or do you sincerely think that only texts from Europe will be canonised?
>>8288047
>Right, Midnight's Children is written in English, by someone with an English accent, who lives in England and has lived in England since childhood, who is UK citizen, writes in a western format, for a western audience, but his books can't be considered western?
Irrelevant, I don't care about any of that, I only care about the specific part of the post that I quoted.
>>8288117
You're off your chops m8. You've lost it. No idea what you're on about other than that you're reading more into things than what is said.
No one has a monopoly on English, but no one said that to begin with. Rushdie writes in English, among other things, and all together add up make it hard to say that he isn't writing from within the western tradition, that it would be difficult to say Midnight's Children can't be part of a western canon.
I didn't say: Rushdie writes in English. Only English people can write in English, therefore Rushdie must be English.
>>8288131
>I didn't say: Rushdie writes in English. Only English people can write in English, therefore Rushdie must be English.
Yes you did, because of the "besides"
Fuck you
>>8288132
fucking marxist.
>>8287805
Maybe it's better the way it is. MRR threads would surely be just as meme-filled and pervaded by bad imitations of his accent as Zizek threads.
I liked satanic verses -- not sure if it rises to canonical though. Seems the merit of the book was overtaken by its controversy.
I can't think of a recent book that rose to the level of canonical in recent years... Is probably stop around blood meridian. Seems Rushdie, Amis and other recents are mostly middlebrow.
Prodigiously anglocentric
>>8287789
>Literary awards
Jesus H. Christ, did you feel bad typing that comment?
>>8288143
kys
>>8288616
Literary awards define what will be canonized in our postmodern era.
>>8289407
"Redshirts, Western Canon." - Anon
>>8288104
>Anything will become part of the canon now, or do you sincerely think that only texts from Europe will be canonised?
Only the future can canonize works. Their impact will canonize them.
A whiny poo talking about India won't be considered as part of the western canon. If, on the other hand, said poo wrote full-on americana/"westernicana" like how Navokob pretty much made himself a quintessential American author even though he was Russian by kinda writing a travelogue of the US in Lolita? Maybe said poo's work could be considered western in such a case.
But as long as he's stuck in India and keeps on shitting in the streets, no, that's not going to happen. And again, it's not that it's not going to happen because I say so. It's that it's not going to happen because the impact it will have (or more like, it will not have) in western literature will deem it so.
