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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Replying to @HeerJeet
Is there any evidence for either of those claims other than the notoriously unreliable Naomi Wolf?
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Replying to @CathyYoung63
Martin Kihn, "Bloom in Love," GQ, November 1990.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Is it available online? I vaguely recall the controversy about it.
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Not sure if the GQ is online anywhere. We'll be hearing a lot more of this in the coming months, I expect.
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