Harold Bloom’s Critical Thinking

>>9376349
But he has also been a controversial voice over his 60-plus-year career. In “The Western Canon” (1994), he argued that certain writers, including Shakespeare, Homer, Dante and Tolstoy, are essential to any real education. He also railed against what he called the “School of Resentment”: scholars who promote reading texts from the point of view of feminism, Marxism and other ideologies and who advocate expanding the canon to be more multicultural. “To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all,” he wrote.

He sees political correctness as a continuing problem in universities today, but he hesitates to wade into the debate again. “I’ve had too many polemics in my life,” he says. “For 50 years I fought the death of humanistic studies in the universities and colleges and, in general, the failure of our intellectual education.” He’s tired of fighting, he says. “We lost the war,” he adds. “All I can do now is a kind of guerrilla action, but in the end there’s only Shakespeare.”

Mr. Bloom was born in the Bronx in New York City and raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. His father was a garment worker and his mother was a homemaker. He once wrote that his older sisters used to take him to the library “and thus transformed my life.”

He studied English at Cornell University and then at Yale, where he joined the faculty after receiving his Ph.D. Today, Mr. Bloom lives in New Haven, Conn., with his wife. They have two grown children.

>>9376349

Thank you for sharing this interview Anon.

>>9376351
In his widely discussed 1973 book “The Anxiety of Influence,” he argued that poets often have a difficult time freeing themselves from their imaginative debt to earlier poets who inspired them. Their own writing can be interpreted as an anxious reaction to those predecessors.

Does he experience his own “anxiety of influence” when he studies Shakespeare? Mr. Bloom swats away any comparison to his great hero. “I’m not really a writer,” he says. As a critic, he writes to appreciate, he says, adding, “I’m nothing but a teacher.”

The next book in his series on Shakespearean characters will focus on Cleopatra, followed by King Lear, Iago and Macbeth. He has turned to the playwright many times over the years. In his 1998 book “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” he argued that Shakespeare was not just a brilliant writer but the genius who created our modern notions of human nature. His characters were the first to develop psychologically, Mr. Bloom wrote, leading to “the inauguration of personality as we have come to recognize it.”

His love for the Bard is just as strong these days. “The body ages and one is not what one was, but [Shakespeare] still cheers me up because it gives me some sense of human potential as perhaps it wanes in me,” he says.

He has made one change in his teaching methods to suit modern students: He no longer asks them to memorize lines from plays and poems, as he used to. With their smartphones and the internet, “it’s getting harder and harder for them to possess things by memory,” he says.

>>9376360
He likes to recite lines of literature every day. “It enhances the being,” he says. When he feels anxious or has to do something he finds uncomfortable—such as going for a walk with his trainer—he silently recites poems to calm himself. When he wakes up in the middle of the night, he chants psalms or passages of Shakespeare, such as, “Thou hast nor youth nor age / But, as it were, an after-dinner sleep, / Dreaming on both” from “Measure for Measure.”

Sometimes he even dreams about teaching Shakespeare. The other night he dreamed that he couldn’t find his copy of “Macbeth,” and then he couldn’t find the classroom where he was supposed to teach.

He says that nothing could keep him from teaching, though. “I will teach my last class until they carry me out in a body bag,” he says. “And wherever I’m going, I’ll go on teaching anyway.”

---END---

>>9376363
I would like to hang with him but he would probably call me a pleb

We should send him a nice note.

>>9376349
>tfw when Bloom dies there will be no one to protect academia against the School of Resentment

You better live till 120 you old patrician.

(((Harold "Stephen King > David Foster Wallace" Bloom)))

>>9376360
>refers to himself by 'one'
dropped

>he pays for his news

Cuck

File: 1492039961483.jpg (114KB, 428x640px) Image search: [Google]

114KB, 428x640px

>>9376746

>>9376349
>first in a series of short studies of Shakespeare characters planned by Mr. Bloom
Hopefully he survives to write all of them

One of the few truly great professors I had in college was an Indian Shakespeare professor. The man was severe, but he knew his shit and would BTFO other students who tried to contradict him on a subject they had no idea about. When I look back on his lectures, I can see a lot of Harold Bloom's ideas in them.

>>9376360
>“The body ages and one is not what one was, but [Shakespeare] still cheers me up because it gives me some sense of human potential as perhaps it wanes in me,”

Harold ;_;

>>9376351
>actually thinking you're not serving an ideology
pure

>>9376349
Bloom has friends?

>>9377716
his books :)

>>9377795
D:

>>9377795
:(