Harold Bloom

[GringoTex]

Just listened to an hour-long inteview with him on the radio. He was completely verboten in the UT-Austin English Department when I took classes there over a decade ago. Very politically incorrect. I like his quality standard. He's like a great movie critic in bookish clothing.

A couple of interesting things he said:

Burton was better at Shakespeare than Olivier.

Hamlet remains the most experimental play ever.

Cormac McCarthy is the greatest American writer since Faulkner

[Dr. Wankler]

When he's not operating in his hyper-polemical he can be more interesting. When he's complaining that, at NYU, he's surrounded by "scholars of hip-hop," then he's a bit over the top (they actually have one person who writes extensively on black music, and she wasn't even in the same department as he was).

The Anxiety of Influence was probably one of the most pernicious ideas in 20th century literary criticism. I think it had more validity in trying to explain the mind of an anthologist trying to figure out what goes into the Norton Anthology (which Bloom was at the time he wrote it) than what poets actually do when the write.

Still, glad to see he's not dead, which was my first thought when I saw this thread.

[GringoTex]

I love the Anxiety of Influence because it championed my right to say to the Lit Prof: "Why are you making us read this poorly-written prose? It sucks."

[Michael K.]

Originally posted by GringoTex
I love the Anxiety of Influence because it championed my right to say to the Lit Prof: "Why are you making us read this poorly-written prose? It sucks."

I'm really interested in hearing what the Prof. was making you read.

[cj herrera]

This is going to sound completely wrong, but I always think of Harold Bloom like I think about God: If he didn't exist, we'd have to invent him; and if he doesn't exist,we're stuck with the invention anyway.

[DoctorJones24]

I was just thumbing through his new little pamphlet on "Hamlet" tonight at a bookstore...decided against it though.

The Anxiety of Influence is most interesting to me for having engendered Gilbert and Gubar "The Madwoman in the Attic."

What is so refreshing about Bloom is that he has held onto the idea that "criticism" of literature SHOULD have an evaluative function, and I think this is an important idea that we are just now beginning to come back to. Quality really became a passe idea there for a while (perhaps it needed to be deemphasized for a while) as people concentrated more on the agendas of texts than on their aesthetic qualities. The result is a generation of lit critics who really aren't very good close readers and who often feel/exude NONE of the passion for books that great teachers like Bloom need to have.

Anyway, remember his list of books at the end of The Western Canon? What a strange beast that was. Is he really expecting us to believe he's well read enough in Uruguayan literature to offer an educated assessment of the very best it has to offer? The scary part is that I half do believe it. I also remain shocked and impressed that he included Thylias Moss, a very little known contemporary black woman poet--she rocks, but I've never heard of anyone else who even knows she exists, and there she was in Blooms list of the western canon...go figure. Btw, I'm not sure where she teaches now, but if you ever get a chance to hear her read/perform, do it!

[GringoTex]

Originally posted by DoctorJones24

What is so refreshing about Bloom is that he has held onto the idea that "criticism" of literature SHOULD have an evaluative function, and I think this is an important idea that we are just now beginning to come back to. Quality really became a passe idea there for a while (perhaps it needed to be deemphasized for a while) as people concentrated more on the agendas of texts than on their aesthetic qualities. The result is a generation of lit critics who really aren't very good close readers and who often feel/exude NONE of the passion for books that great teachers like Bloom need to have.


Yeah, that's what I meant to say.

[Dr. Wankler]

Originally posted by DoctorJones24
The result is a generation of lit critics who really aren't very good close readers and who often feel/exude NONE of the passion for books that great teachers like Bloom need to have.

I might be flattering myself, but I like to think that that's the reason why I didn't finish my Ph.D. in English. But while I disagree with a lot of Bloom's theories and his readings, I really like reading him when he's talking about a poem or book he cares about.

Anyway, I work in a library these days, and a student just returned Bloom's book about Wallace Stevens (Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate). Bloom quotes the following passage as an epigram

(WARNING: POETRY AHEAD. SOME PASSAGES MAY STRIKE SOME READERS AS OBSCURE AND DIFFICULT, AND BOTANICAL IMAGERY MAY CAUSE INSECURE MALES DISCOMFORT ABOUT THEIR MASCULINITY)

In the punctual centre of all circles white
Stands truly. The circles nearest to it share

Its color, but less as they recede, impinged
By difference and then by definition
As a tone defines itself and separates

And the circles quicken and crystal colors come
And flare and Bloom with his vast accumulation
Stands and regards and repeats the primitive lines.

--Stevens, From the Packet of Anacharsis

Some might call that egotistical on Bloom's part, but it's pretty damn funny to me.