Harold Bloom is an academic slut who will put his name on anything

"only a blockhead would write for anything except money"

>>9410375
hes literally compared himself to Milton's Satan. There's so much to glean about his character/personality just from that sentence alone

>>9410375
criticism of character =/= criticism of ideals

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>>9410459
>milton's Satan
>personality
choose one, kiddo
>t. harold bloom

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I feel like Bloom, as an old ethnic Jew who's an atheist, really doesn't get religion at all, and therefore cannot possibly appreciate The Lord of the Rings.

>>9410751
Is that Bloom? Fucking kek. Why are Shakespeareists always so insecure about Milton?

>>9410375
This. And, Bloom's own """serious""" criticism is Freudian melodramatic bullshit, banal at best.

>>9410757
LOTR is a children's fantasy series that mental midget man-children project their insecurities into. In a world where most all cheap, dime-a-dozen fictions are generally able to allow a muddling of good and evil in character motivations, LOTR is the one thing that allows them the incredibly stupid idea that there is an armed political party of evil for evil's sake, against which the cartoonishly undeveloped secondary character they attach themselves to undeservedly obtains kingship by thwarting (by indirect means) the party of evil.

>>9410790
Did you read it?

>>9410375
Didn't Bloom once recommend the Hobbit when asked about good children's literature?

>>9410751
>women and men

Has anyone read Bloom on Dante? What's funny is that Bloom seems to love Dante, but he's just as Catholic as Tolkien.

>>9410826

Yeah he likes The Hobbit.

>I suspect that The Lord of the Rings is fated to become only an intricate
>period piece, while The Hobbit may well survive as children’s literature. Really
>good-natured fantasy is hard to come by, and one convincing personality
>at its center is all it requires. No other figure in The Hobbit can be called a
>personality, but Bilbo Baggins is so vivid and persistent that he makes up
>for all the others. The first thing we hear Bilbo say is “Good morning!” to
>the self-important wizard Gandalf, who is rude enough to overinterpret the
>remark. Bilbo’s last exclamation is also to Gandalf, who has become more
>respectful and even fond of Mr. Baggins by the end of the book but still
>feels compelled to remind him that “you are only quite a little fellow in a
>wide world after all!” Charming as always, Bilbo comforts us with a laughing
>“Thank goodness!”

>>9410757
Nah. I'm an atheist, and I love Tolkien's work. Not just LOTR, but also the Silmarilliion, etc. I'm sure there are many atheists who appreciate Tolkien at a high level.

>>9410751
Does Bloom actually think that Shakespeare writes realistic humans? Kek. I mean he does, on occasion. Hamlet, for example. But most Shakespeare characters are just cardboard cutouts, bags for the bard to fill with pontification and sex jokes.

>>9410870

He has yet to take the final redpill. That is:

Goethe > Shakespeare

>>9410880

Too hard to swallow desu

>>9410790
But in Tolkien's fictional universe, there ARE such things as good and evil. It's not stupid. It's the logical consequence of inventing a world in which god is real, there is life after death, and ancient demigods do battle with the help of mortal proxies. Of course it would be idiotic to try to model real-life political thoughts on the Tolkien universe. Tolkien himself would have agreed! Jeeze. Read his collected letters. Don't get me wrong - I love more realistic depictions of morality and politics. That doesn't mean I insist every work of art I read must be realistic in that sense.

>>9410866
Same. Hadn't even noticed the christian themes until they were pointed out to me. I don't understand how Tolkien's work could be criticized per se, or anything further than to say it doesn't appeal to you personally

>>9410866
You don't have to be an actual theist to "get" religion, I feel. You just need to understand where it all comes from.

I feel like Bloom doesn't. I feel like he's too caught up on aesthetics for their own sake, which is why he seems so cool to books that are carried mostly by their strivings at the transcendent, but may not have the best prose.

>>9410880
no thanks

>>9410757
he has a love/hate relationship with tolkein, but despises c.s. lewis' fiction for children. [c.s. lewis got BTFO so hard by g.e.m. anscombe that he stopped writing theology, so it's no surprise that bloom doesn't like that]

honestly? yours is the conclusion that i came to as well. as an old, jewish atheist, bloom simply does not *get* the sublimity of christian children's lit. it's really not a shortcoming that he could read his way out of; he much prefers secular works like "the wind in the willows" (which is, of course, amazing).

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>>9410987
also, pic related for anscombe

>>9410757
nah he's a gnostic 'of the old school'

>>9410757
Bloom's religion is literature

>>9410386
>only a blockhead would write for anything except money
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."