Harold Bloom on Charlie Rose

[adrock3215]

I just stumbled upon this Charlie Rose interview of Harold Bloom, probably done sometime around the mid 90's. Bloom is one of my favorite Humanities professors. He is the preeminent literary critic of the 20th century (well, him and Northrop Frye I suppose), and an English professor at Yale and NYU.

The interview is about the release of Bloom's book, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, which includes a list of some 800 authors and 3,000 works that should be read on the basis of aesthetic value. Of course, when the book came out, many on the left attacked it for including "too many white men."

In this interview, he strongly comes out against today's university environment (he calls it the 'School of Resentment'), with its various politicized studies of literature, as well as the literary criticism of today, which its emphasis on criticism from various ideological perspective, i.e. 'feminist criticism', 'Marxist criticism', etc. On one hand, he disagrees with the conversative inclination to solely search for moral value in literature; on the other hand, he disagrees with the liberal multiculturalist inclination that, as he says "is not asking us to read Cervantes over Shakespeare, but rather extremely inadequate chicano writers" over Cervantes. He offers his view of reading, which is more centered around the self, specifically the improvement of individual cognitive power. He quotes Aristotle in the interview, who said that the ability to create metaphor is "the special mark of genius in every one of us."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBqO3Q0eE3I

Edited January 16, 2009 by adrock3215