1. The Harold Bloom conversation seems to be people talking at cross-purposes with one group saying "let's celebrate the great man's work" & another saying "he was a creep & predator." But maybe the two sides can be linked? What's the relationship between the life & work?
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2. I thought this Times obituary did a disservice to Bloom by foregrounding his banal late-period "Western canon is
" rather than the scholarly work that his lasting reputation rests on (the advocacy for the romantics & "Anxiety of Influence"3 replies 6 retweets 80 likesShow this thread -
3. I'm not the biggest fan of Freud or Bloom but "Anxiety of Influence" did help return history to literary studies (in a period of arid formalism) by showing the richness of poets responding to each other. Also: Bloom wasn't cowed by Eliot/Pound's dismissal of the romantics
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4. But by the 1970s, Bloom's individualism (inherited from the romantics) was already atrophying into a kind of maniacal narcissism: all that counted was the strong writer and the strong reader (the strongest of whom was Bloom), a veritable God-like creature.
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5. Some context: Bloom, like other Yale bigwigs, responded badly to the social movements of the 1970s, particularly feminism. Yale English was notoriously hostile to female grad students. And Bloom preyed on students. His hyper-individualism was intellectual counterpart to this.
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6. Hyper-individualism is everywhere in Bloom -- in the exaltation of Emerson, in gnosticism, in how his pathway to Judaism was mysticism, in his revival of hoariest idea of "genius." That hyper-individualism, I'd argue, was rooted in his rejection of social movements.
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7. Bloom's arguments for divorcing literature from its social context - for seeing writers as God-like beings who create but are not created - was a retreat from his own best work and also, sadly, a way of justifying an elite that was beyond normal morality.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Not to say that it's not fruitful to try to connect his scholarly and personal life, but...cultural materialists prey on their students, too.
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Oh, absolutely. But you can accuse those men of being hypocrites. The interesting thing about Bloom was he was no hypocrite -- the life & work line up.
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