A counter-suggestion about Bloom and politics: By the mid-'60s, he'd already
been through such uproars of politics in his academic situation, that many
people, like me (a grad. student at Yale then) took his assertion of what
Frederick Pollack calls "apoliticism" as a highly political gesture indeed.
Of course this was before everyone went around muttering "All politics is
personal," but wasn't it always?
Apolitically, if that's possible, I cherish the description of Bloom as a
pumpkin on a bicycle in an earlier Pollack poem.
Susan Holahan
on 11/12/08 9:13 AM, bj omanson at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> FP wrote: "... and both then and now I dislike his total apoliticism."
>
> I don't know much about Bloom apart from his early work on the Romantics.
> Do you think his apoliticism was an aspect of his attraction to
> nosticism? --- that one must disengage with the world in order to delve
> inward?
>
> It brings to mind Tolstoy's criticism of the Symbolists, or Kropotkin's
> criticism of the Parisian avant-garde -- that the cost of pursuing an
> internal artistic quest is to ignore the political and social struggles of
> the world you live in. It's a dilemma that keeps resurfacing. The writers
> and artists of the 1930s facing the rise of fascism, or Bob Dylan in the
> mid-60s suddenly turning personal.
>
> BJ
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