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Aesthetic Value Emanates From The Struggle Between Texts: In The Reader, In Language, In The Classroom, In Arguments Within A Society. Aesthetic Value Rises Out Of Memory, And So (as Nietzsche Saw) Out Of Pain, The Pain Of Surrendering Easier Pleasures In Favour Of Much More Difficult Ones ... Successful Literary Works Are Achieved Anxieties, Not Releases From Anxieties.

-Harold Bloom

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Aesthetic Value Emanates From

Harold Bloom

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Aesthetic Value Emanates From The Struggle Between Texts: In The Reader, In Language, In The Classroom, In Arguments Within A Society. Aesthetic Value Rises Out Of Memory, And So (as Nietzsche Saw) Out Of Pain, The Pain Of Surrendering Easier Pleasures In Favour Of Much More Difficult Ones ... Successful Literary Works Are Achieved Anxieties, Not Releases From Anxieties.

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At Our Present Bad Moment, We Need Above All To Recover Our Sense Of Literary Individuality And Of Poetic Autonomy.

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People Cannot Stand The Saddest Truth I Know About The Very Nature Of Reading And Writing Imaginative Literature, Which Is That Poetry Does Not Teach Us How To Talk To Other People: It Teaches Us How To Talk To Ourselves. What I'm Desperately Trying To Do Is To Get Students To Talk To Themselves As Though They Are Indeed Themselves, And Not Someone Else.

Information Is Endlessly Available To Us; Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

If We Read The Western Canon In Order To Form Our Social, Political, Or Personal Moral Values, I Firmly Believe We Will Become Monsters Of Selfishness And Exploitation.

Unless You Have Read And Absorbed The Best That Can Be Read And Absorbed, You Will Not Think Clearly Or Well.

But In The End, In The End One Is Alone. We Are All Of Us Alone. I Mean I'm Told These Days We Have To Consider Ourselves As Being In Society... But In The End One Knows One Is Alone, That One Lives At The Heart Of A Solitude.

Shakespeare Will Not Make Us Better, And He Will Not Make Us Worse, But He May Teach Us How To Overhear Ourselves When We Talk To Ourselves... He May Teach Us How To Accept Change In Ourselves As In Others, And Perhaps Even The Final Form Of Change.

Reading Well Is One Of The Greatest Pleasures That Solitude Can Afford You.

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Socrates, In Plato, Formulates Ideas Of Order: The Iliad, Like Shakespeare, Knows That A Violent Disorder Is A Great Order.

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Indeed The Three Prophecies About The Death Of Individual Art Are, In Their Different Ways, Those Of Hegel, Marx, And Freud. I Don't See Any Way Of Getting Beyond Those Prophecies.

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.

We Read Deeply For Varied Reasons, Most Of Them Familiar: That We Cannot Know Enough People Profoundly Enough; That We Need To Know Ourselves Better; That We Require Knowledge, Not Just Of Self And Others, But Of The Way Things Are. Yet The Strongest, Most Authentic Motive For Deep Reading…is The Search For A Difficult Pleasure.

...the Bible Itself Is Less Read Than Preached, Less Interpreted Than Brandished. Increasingly, Pastors May Drape A Limply Bound Book Over The Edges Of The Pulpit As They Depart From It. Members Of The Congregation Carry Bibles To Church Services; The Paster Announces A Long Passage Text For His Sermon And Waits For People To Find It, Then Reads Only The First Verse Of It Before He Takes Off. The Book Has Become A Talisman.

Reading Well Makes Children More Interesting Both To Themselves And Others, A Process In Which They Will Develop A Sense Of Being Separate And Distinct Selves.

There Is A God, And His Name Is Aristophanes.

Shakespeare Is Universal.

I Would Say That There Is No Future For Literary Studies As Such In The United States.

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I Realized Early On That The Academy And The Literary World Alike - And I Don't Think There Really Is A Distinction Between The Two - Are Always Dominated By Fools, Knaves, Charlatans And Bureaucrats.

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I Am Naive Enough To Read Incessantly Because I Cannot, On My Own, Get To Know Enough People Profoundly Enough.

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We Can Be Reluctant To Recognize How Much Of Our Culture Was Literary, Particularly Now That So Many Of The Institutional Purveyors Of Literature Happily Have Joined In Proclaiming Its Death. A Substantial Number Of Americans Who Believe They Worship God Actually Worship Three Major Literary Characters: The Yahweh Of The J Writer (earliest Author Of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), The Jesus Of The Gospel Of Mark, And Allah Of The Koran.

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Counter Culture

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Falling In Love

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I Think Freud Is About Contamination, But I Think That Is Something He Learned From Shakespeare, Because Shakespeare Is About Nothing But Contamination, You Might Say.

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