Beattie on Bloom

While Bloom strove to make literary criticism accessible to the general public, he also demonstrated outright antipathy for identity politics in the realm of literary commentary. In his best-known text, 1973’s The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom wrote, “We are now in an era of so-called ‘cultural criticism,’ which devalues all imaginative literature … Politicizing literary study has destroyed literary study, and may yet destroy learning itself.”

My fellow elderly fella and estranged-now-reconciled book blogger Steven Beattie, who I affectionately call Beats, with some thoughts on the passing of Harold Bloom. Beattie is one of our most reliable critics and is always a smart read.

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