Bloom's Modern Critical Views - F. Scott Fitzgerald (2006) (270p) [Inua].pdf

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Hardcover – May, 2006
by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 253 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L); 2 edition (May 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791085708
ISBN-13: 978-0791085707

Presents a collection of contemporary criticism and analysis of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Harold Bloom, sprightly, cantankerous, and as rueful as he claimed was one of his finest protégé critics, Tom Disch, remains the effervescent, sallying knight. He could no more lay down the lance nor keep it from cracking against the bulwarks of ignorance, stupidity, and splintering the moon (to crib from Harry’s favorite, Shakespeare) than another of Bloom’s loved ones, Don Quixote, could abjure his paladin’s endeavors. Bloom, the perdurable cannon blasting at the canon for himself to gain the sort of canonization reserved for Dr. Johnson, understands, as did Oscar Wilde, that all “literary criticism” is founded on personal wealth of wisdom, grace, charity, pragmatism, and a sense of sublimity as regards aesthetics. Moreover, at the crux, is Harry the Harry always feting and following Falstaff, that supremely corpulent and cormorant individualist. One must therefore read into whatever Harry writes, the makings of informed opinion resting on specialized knowledge contained within an infinite individuality and apolitical virtuousness, for true virtue blooms only in the individual thing, not the seasoned collective. Bloom knows the same thing any honest member of the modern scholastic scene (so-called ACADEME), which is to say, that no such thing exists as “literary theory” for the facts of theoretical bases, functional experimentalism, and empirical inquiry. One cannot—at least not yet—so refine, reduce, observe, differentiate, classify, or demarcate a “work of art.” Art is not a lepidopterist’s pastime, aside from Nabokov.
- By Tony Daley