Criticism in the universities, I'll have... by Harold Bloom

Sympathy literary critic Shakespeare scholar The Western Canon

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

- Harold Bloom

Other quotes by Harold Bloom

Cause

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

- Harold Bloom

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

- Harold Bloom

Negative Thinking School Sense

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

- Harold Bloom

Present End First People

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.

- Harold Bloom

Progress

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

- Harold Bloom

Suffering End

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

- Harold Bloom

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