Thanks Borges. From the GGG subtopic "Thoroughly Modern Miscellany", inclusion and the ping is due to the importance of Harold Bloom.
Posted on 10/14/2019 1:23:28 PM PDT by Borges
Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who championed and defended the Western canon in an outpouring of influential books that appeared not only on college syllabuses but also — unusual for an academic — on best-seller lists, died on Monday at a hospital in New Haven. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Jeanne Bloom, who said he taught his last class at Yale University on Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
89 years old and still teaching at Yale? Must have had a sucky retirement plan.
Oh he was extremely well off and had been for a long time. He just loved Literature like a religion.
My Great-Grandfather lived to be 98 and you couldn’t pry him off his tractor. His work was his life and couldn’t even fathom what retirement was.
He probably wanted to maintain Yale’s reputation of academic excellence
At first I thought he was the author of
“The Closing of the American Mind”. which was a huge seller back in 1987. But no. That was Allan Bloom.
A tower among men. His was one of the first books that helped me question my unfailing leftist perspective.
They were in the same camp for the most part.
Which book are you talking about?
Thanks Borges. From the GGG subtopic "Thoroughly Modern Miscellany", inclusion and the ping is due to the importance of Harold Bloom.
Whoops, I was thinking of Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.
Bad me.
From Wiki -
“His position was that politics had no place in literary criticism, that a feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but probably nothing about Hamlet itself.”
I like that. If you’re interpreting with a political angle, you’re re-writing the book, not reading it for personal insight.
A quick primer on the man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom
At a certain age, particularly at the Ivies and other top notch schools at a certain age to become a professor emeritus and move to 1/2 pay. You get to keep an office, can teach, do research, have graduate students, etc. but you do have lighter duties.
This is a shame, may the great man RIP. To those who have read his books he was a great teacher of literature. By the way one of his students was Camille Paglia whose thesis he directed.
I read his book “The Lucifer Principal” the week before 9/11. His chapter on Bin-Laden and Islamic radicals predicted 9\11 and when everyone on TV wondered who done it, it was clear in my mind. I heard about the book on coast-to-coast am, where he was often interviewed. A smart man. I don’t know about his politics.
I took his graduate course in Wordsworth and Keats in 1977, when I was in Yale Grad School. He was a true polymath, who put only a small fraction of what he knew into his books. He had an amazing grasp of the politics and social history of England in the 18th and 19th century.
Wrong Bloom......
I think Harold Bloom wrote The Flight to Lucifer, a sci-fi novel.
Strangely enough, his latest book (on the “American Canon”) is due to be released tomorrow.
Influenced Camille Paglia, who influenced Rush and Drudge.
Only thing I’ve ever read by him is his “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human”, and that’s been awhile.
But he stuck up for the reading canon when the rest of the humanities were taking the path of least resistance and catering to snowflakes.
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