Word: freude
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...does not really expect his Common Readers to master 850 or so writers. He wants them to pay close attention to the 26 discussed in the bulk of his book: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa and Beckett. This grouping, Bloom's elite among the elite, holds few surprises: an obligatory academic obscurity (Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa), four women and a majority of D.W.E.M.s. (Bloom gives canonical status to Homer and the major Greek dramatists and philosophers but does...
This assertion is just as extraliterary as those set forth by feminists, multiculturalists and all the others who discuss books in ways Bloom ridicules and despises. And Bloom's view produces chapter titles such as "Freud: A Shakespearean Reading" and "Joyce's Agon with Shakespeare," in which the actual works and words of the upstart authors are wrenched out of context and forced into hypothetical bouts of cross-generational arm wrestling...
Surely no one opens The Interpretation of Dreams or Finnegans Wake in the hope of finding out exactly how Freud or Joyce dealt with that pesky, overbearing Shakespeare, particularly when Harold Bloom is ready with shorthand answers in The Western Canon. Why then, in this distraction-besotted time, read demanding, imaginative literature at all? On this topic, Bloom is uncharacteristically tentative. "Reading the very best writers -- let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy -- is not going to make us better citizens." And: "The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will...
Still, most high school students say they feelthe same as Perez, who is taking genetics and aclass on Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein andSigmund Freud...
Still, most high school students say they feelthe same as Perez, who is taking genetics and aclass on Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein andSigmund Freud...