---Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> Hey, Bloom was one of my heroes as an undergrad, along with Geoffrey
> Hartman,
Oh yeah, Geoffrey Hartman's done great stuff on jazz and improv, though it's been a while since I read him. Bloom was the first critic I read who wrote as enthusiastically as I felt about Hart Crane, and just for that he was formative for me in ways. But his tradition thing seems less relevant these days. I mean Ashbery may be next in line from Stevens and Whitman, but I don't think such a singular tradition is so central now. I mean, just read Ashbery, all that slipery, de-centeredness, and the "other" tradition stuff.
and reading the Anxiety of Influence in 1972 changed my life.
> Bloom isn't really a conservative in the political sense - he's
certainly
> no fan of the Xtian right.
True, and using those political evaluations in an art-world or academic context may be to deny their narrow implications. But that doesn't mean one shouldn't draw those implications out and see what they mean. Why is Bloom so hostile towards the "experimental" crowd? Why some contemporary poets cooly dismissive of Bloom? A whole spate of anthologies has sprouted contra- Bloom and Vendler. There's publishers like Sun & Moon Press and Exact Change (owned by Damon and Naomi of the former band of the same name!) who explicitly seek out "marginalized" non-canonized writers. Which is a wonderful thing, but must it depend on the position of a Bloom or Vendler against which it operates? And what does this conflict say about politics and university authority?
He's just an old-fashioned elitist. He hated the
> 60s for all the usual high culture reasons; there's an essay in one
of his
> pre-Anxiety collections complaining about the new decadence of the
student
> rebellion.
Don't think I've seen that. Which collection?
>
> But his version of influence (and when I saw him read in NYC a
couple of
> years ago, he mentioned that the Romanian translation of the Anxiety
of
> Influence was literally something like The Fear of Contamination)
isn't
> something that happens consciously - it's an unconscious drama,
something
> like an oedipal struggle.
Good point. What Jim & I were talking about was more a conscious thing, as was the pedagogy involved when I was back in school.
Alec _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com