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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 0-9

The Future of Literary Imagination and its Forms in Relation to Catalan Achievement

Author: Harold Bloom
Organisation: Yale University
Publish Date: May 2002
Country: Global
Sector: Social Development
Method: Creative thinking
Theme: Public Good
Type: Other publication
Language: English
Tags: Literature forms, Modernism, Individual genius, Knowledge, Wisdom, Narrative, Literary critics, Catalan language, Jewish language, Renaissance roots

Bloom begins his address with a polemical statement targeted on the epigones of modernism (and, by implication, of postmodernism too). He declares that, as one who 'grew up in the literary epoch of high modernism', he never accepted the belief of that period that human nature had somehow irrevocably changed near the beginning of the twentieth century - thus throwing down the gauntlet to those who would read the literature of the past through the sole prism of the present and its immediate concerns. He goes on to make the by now expected complaints against 'the epoch of resentment and political correctness', and, in the same breath, to distance himself from the cyberutopians and their belief that network technologies will bring about a qualitative transformation of consciousness. For Bloom, what continues to matter is the printed page: indeed, he declares provocatively that 'the Internet horrifies me', seeing the plethora of on-line information as a nightmare of excess, an infinitely expanded version of the flood of unsolicited textual material with which, as America's best known literary critic, he has himself been inundated with for years in paper form. Consciously drawing on Jorge Luis Borges' anti-utopian visions of random, self-reproducing systems, Bloom paints a dark picture of the Internet as an 'immense ocean without form', 'a universal sea of chaos': 'the Internet has no form, unless it be that of one of Borges' labyrinths'.
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