Thanks, Susan. The only name I could recall was Harold, but obviously that
was incorrect. Haven't been back to Hyde Park for near ten years, and my
few contacts are mostly northsiders. As a braggy [not really, obviously]
aside: Barack Obama was my state legislator, and my son attended the high
school where Michelle had gone. I came to feel that Obama was a singular
political force, but had no inkling that he'd have been able to move himself
ahead so fantastically well.
I do at times miss the community; the UC influence, tho, not so much. I
agree about the competition for faculty posts now. It was impossible then!
But now? Painful to imagine.
Chicago itself is a beautiful, grand, tough and brilliant city---the most
creative theatre city, I think, in the USA.
Best,
Judy
2008/11/12 Susan Holahan <[log in to unmask]>
> Wasn't the Chicago Bloom Alan? The one at Yale was Harold. Still is. Alan's
> dead. He was part of that strange neocon cluster of fairly "great" scholars
> at Chicago that seemed, regrettably, to include even the Sanskritist Wendy
> Doniger O'Flaherty.
>
> The star-making you refer to did seem to depend largely on bombast. Has it
> stopped since? I think I see greedy "stars" all over. I'd hate to be a
> young, aspiring academic now.
>
> on 11/12/08 11:50 AM, Judy Prince at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> > Susan, are we talking about the same Bloom that held sway at U of
> Chicago,
> > those horrid Great Books seminars, and such? I was a longtime Hyde Park
> > resident, but never attended UC [graduated U of M]; got the feeling,
> though,
> > that bombasting faculty members often became the 'stars', and, therefore,
> > grabbed up the elite few highly paid professorships.
> > Best,
> >
> > Judy
> >
> > 2008/11/12 Susan Holahan <[log in to unmask]>
> >
> >> on 11/12/08 10:41 AM, Dominic Fox at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> >>
> >>>> His interpretations of individual poems were often--well--off. Look,
> for
> >>>> example, at "The Visionary Company" (very early book on the
> Romantics).
> >> Or
> >>>> don't: it's irritating. He loves to pronounce in large terms, finesse
> >> the
> >>>> details.
> >>>>
> >>> I believe the term is "strong misreading". Strong critics rationalise
> >>> their own weaknesses. And rationalise this rationalisation as critical
> >>> strength.
> >>>
> >>> Dominic
> >>
> >> You're right. I'd forgotten. Operating under the influence not of
> anxiety
> >> but of the great Europeans (Spitzer, Curtius, etc.), I quarreled with
> Bloom
> >> in his seminar on the Romantics until I ran out of patience. He
> quarreled
> >> indulgently with young women then, no "School of Resentment" allusions.
> >>
> >> Susan H.
> >>
>
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