During vacation there was much conversation surrounding literary theory/criticism and literature, their function, their opacity, what the words even mean, and why we read them in the first place. In the midst of this, Harold Bloom, the popular critic and professor, came up time and again. "I enjoy reading Bloom," I said, "but the man seems disagreeable, derisive and divisive." (this alliteration was purely coincidental).
In the comments to an earlier post, someone pasted Bloom writing on Stephen King, and he has a similar article on Harry Potter. His opinion: these are bad authors writing bad fiction and the world should stop reading them, to put it mildly.
Here's what I don't really understand. If Bloom wants to continue doing culture criticism (which he does) and ivory tower criticism (which he also does), what should we make of him? Of course DeLillo and McCarthy are better writers than Stephen King. Does anyone really argue differently? Does that mean Bloom should belittle the rest of American culture because they don't read it? Or is he upset because the academic culture studies King and Rowling?
Popularizing Shakespeare Studies is great, and I love Invention of the Human, hopefully it brings people to read Shakespeare. But telling people that reading Harry Potter is actually worse than not reading at all just seems like a waste of energy.
I know some of you out there have opinions on Bloom, and on criticism and popular literature, so lets hear it.
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Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. -Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction
7 comments:
you told me pop books were bad...
i told you no such thing, anonymous individual of criticism.
Brit critic Terry Eagleton wrote an article about Harold Bloom that I suspect most readers would agree with. His first line is: "Harold Bloom was once an interesting critic." Hopefully this link works.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/classics/0,6121,356270,00.html
As for Stephen King, I think he's fun and Bloom's energies tearing him down are indeed a waste. I listened wide-eyed to his short tales from Nightshift all da way to Bawston.
Terry’s criticism is harsh. And rather convincing. I don’t doubt that Bloom’s recent pop crit books are perhaps threadbare and stale. But lets not forget that Terry won’t like How to Read and Why because Terry doesn’t like Bloom’s rather spiritual/universal version of why. Even though Terry may have once been a catholic and perhaps knows a thing or two about religion, he is still through and through a new historicist and so resides on the far end of the spectrum of theory, opposite Bloom. Based on the theses of new historicism, Terry believes and has confessed, there may well come a time and culture who will not like Shakespeare, for whom Shakespeare will be perhaps invalid, redundant, or even, just bad art. In other words, there are no universals. While on the contrary Bloom believes and confesses that Shakespeare is pretty much a Gnostic god, has rid himself of his fleshly shackles and bears us grails/plays of brimming truth tapped straight from the cosmic source.
Terry is professor of cultural theory where as Bloom is a kind of Gnostic Freudian new-critic. The difference is wide and ideological. Terry stupidly is ignoring this fact and proving to be down right mean.
I'm a staunch Bloom apologist, but it is clear old brontosaurus has little new to write about these days (save some of his recent meditations on religion). i agreed with eagleton on many points, and can't argue that bloom's most interesting criticism is well behind him. in fact, i can think of 4 books he's written in the last 15 years that are essentially the same thing: 'western canon,' 'how to read and why,' 'genius,' and 'where shall wisdom be found?' throw in 'stories and poems for extremely intelligent children' and 'the best poems of the english language' and it starts to get a little embarrasing.
but what bloom has successfully done in all these pop crit books has made me hungrier for reading. bloom's passion for literature is infectuous and is perhaps unrivaled; this is a man who willingly chose to memorize all 12 books of 'paradise lost.' anyways, in his epilogue to 'western canon,' bloom berates those highly theoretical schools--like Eagleton--and claims at heart they all hate to read anyhow. he's right ya know; whenever i read eagleton, i don't want to read anymore either. atleast when bloom is 'down right mean,' he's charming.
i think that the ideological schools do have things to offer the conversation, though they ultimatly seem to falter after a certain distance. Eagleton, whom i have enjoyed at times, brings things that unfortunately Bloom can simply reject if he ever deemed it necessary, because he doesn't need to respond.
vice versa for eagleton.
how great is the term "cack-handedly" from eagleton on bloom's writing.
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