Is it me or is this book a bunch of shit? I guess it's

>>8918514
Its a Big Book of Memes

You shouldn't expect anything more of it.

never read that but i read some of his writing about pynchon and gravity's rainbow, and i was like "ok cool this guy gets it!" which one would certainly hope since he is one of the more esteemed living critics, so i suspect if you have a problem with it, it's probably you not him

>American
>lists a bunch of worthless anglo tripe but shows an obvious lack of deep knowledge of every other countries' literature
>still feels he has the right to say his meme goodreads list is the western canon
Fuck this lardass

>>8918514
Read The Anxiety of Influence, pleb

Why would you read a book written for the masses and expect the pinnacle of critical sophistication? This book is for people who have never read a good book outside of school before. If you want serious Bloom, get The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom at his best is extremely good and consistently both challenging and persuasive.

File: 0sdpjdwj63wnkjgleug7.png (24KB, 400x400px) Image search: [Google]

24KB, 400x400px

>>8918931
>Hahaha "pleb"!!!
You need to go back.

>>8918931
after i saw a interview with bloom were he looked nervous that they would ask him to explain it and then said it was "just a prose poem a dreamed up as a young man" and looked like he didn't even understand it himself, i kind of lost interest in it

>>8918514
His arguments aren't always good/well fleshed out and his list isn't perfect. But you have to respect him, one of the last defenders of the canon in academia. Honestly /lit/ should love this guy, he is the embodiment of a reader. The fact that he defends the idea of the western canon should be enough for people to like him. I fear for the future of the canon because of the politicization of art/lit in academia today.

>>8919439
>Honestly /lit/ should love this guy, he is the embodiment of a reader.

Honestly, I bought the book because I liked him in interviews. You're right about that, there's definitely a lot of love for reading, but he just doesn't make sense half the time. He's a much better talker than a writer. Maybe if he lived a little later he could make a cool youtube show or something.

>>8919451
Your opinion of him is based solely off of the Western Canon book, if you're OP, and Bloom himself said that this book shouldn't be taken too seriously. Read his other works that have more depth to them.

>>8918931
http://www.cosmoetica.com/D1-DES1.htm

Pleb

>>8918923

Here are the 26 writers Bloom claims are central, if not fully representative, of the canon:

William Shakespeare
Dante Alighieri
Geoffrey Chaucer
Miguel de Cervantes
Michel de Montaigne
Molière
John Milton
Samuel Johnson
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
William Wordsworth
Jane Austen
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Leo Tolstoy
Henrik Ibsen
Sigmund Freud
Marcel Proust
James Joyce
Virginia Woolf
Franz Kafka
Jorge Luis Borges
Pablo Neruda
Fernando Pessoa
Samuel Beckett

Exactly half are non-English writers, and others, notably Samuel Beckett, preferred to write in a language other than English.

Given that Bloom is a native English speaker, it's not surprising he seems biased towards works in that langauge.