There is no such thing as "the canon". One man's

What's your WPM?

>>9408003
I don't understand why people say "art is subjective read what you want" and then get so buttblasted when Bloom shits on Harry Potter

>>9408010
"art is subjective read what you want" is code for "don't criticize my shit taste"
It means don't read HP if you don't want to, but also never say anything bad about it

>>9408003
Except it's not his personal opinions. It's the most influential stuff.

>>9408010
>>9408026
You can shit on Harry Potter all you like; God knows there are some glaring flaws with it. But Bloom always tries to set himself up as the arbiter of taste, like if he pans something that means it's objectively bad and you'd have to be a shit-eating moron to disagree. Ultimately, there's just nothing special about him that puts him above any other English scholar, certainly not to the point he can define a "canon".

File: IMG_7535.jpg (131KB, 980x552px) Image search: [Google]

131KB, 980x552px

>>9408003
>non-canonical musings.

>>9408043
>But Bloom always tries to set himself up as the arbiter of taste
This is a problem with you mate.

>>9408033
What about works which were hugely important in their own day which nobody reads now?

>>9408060
"However diffidently I give the answer," he writes in Kabbalah & Criticism, "I am engaged in canon-formation, in trying to help decide a question that is ultimately of a sad importance: 'Which poet shall live?' "

>>9408043
>guy states his opinion forcefully
>omg hitler stop trying to say things are objectively bad!

>>9408077
Ya, that's not the point.

it seems like people on here say "they make it seem like something they say is bad is objectively bad" about every single critic
maybe it's you, guys

>>9408043

Why give a shit about Bloom's opinion to the point where you have to get pissy about it on a message board?

>>9408043
>And yet I feel a discomfort with the Harry Potter mania, and I hope that
my discontent is not merely a highbrow snobbery, or a nostalgia for a more
literate fantasy to beguile (shall we say) intelligent children of all ages.
Can more than 35 million book buyers, and their offspring, be wrong? yes,
they have been, and will continue to be for as long as they persevere with
Potter.

>A vast concourse of inadequate works, for adults and for children, crams
the dustbins of the ages. At a time when public judgment is no better and
no worse than what is proclaimed by the ideological cheerleaders who
have so destroyed humanistic study, anything goes. The cultural critics
will, soon enough, introduce Harry Potter into their college curriculum,
and The New York Times will go on celebrating another confirmation of
the dumbing-down it leads and exemplifies.

I think he justifies his opinions adequately

>>9408033
This. It's not really just him deciding what should or should not be canon. He has a lot of help from heaps of others in deciding what makes the cut. He's basically just compiling the list.

>>9408060
>>9408087
These both are non-answers and should not have been written.

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.

It’s a deal.

I wish I had nothing to do with it. I literally did it off the top of my head, since I have a pretty considerable memory, in about three hours one afternoon.

It does seem like the sort of thing that a publisher would ask for to make the book more palatable to a casual reader.

It doesn’t exist. Let’s go on.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/harold-bloom-431-v15n12

>>9408033
Mostly. There are some really obscure figures he cites in his canonical list that really just amount to his own opinion.

Most of it you can't really argue against though.

>>9408926
He's just talking about the list in that one book. This doesn't invalidate the idea of a canon.