NP..."Like a patient etherized upon a table".....

[Bekah]

Indeed,  if a work were to surface which happened to  “spring into the world fully formed, ” I would not likely be fully formed enough to comprehend it. 

Bekah

On Feb 1, 2012, at 3:56 PM, Bled Welder wrote:

> I think it was Bertrand Russell who demanded of Elliot:  what?
> 
> Or vice verse.
> 
> Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 17:28:18 -0500
> Subject: Re: NP..."Like a patient etherized upon a table".....
> From: barbiegaze at gmail.com
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> 
> But no serious critic has ever imagined that great works of literature “spring into the world fully formed.” From Ancient Greece to the Renaissance to the neo-classicism of the 18th century, it was universally assumed that literary artists, like painters and composers, develop their voices through dialogue with their predecessors, blending imitation with variation, so carving a space for themselves in the canon. The most magisterial account of the process remains TS Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919). Bloom’s book was little more than a Freudian extrapolation of Eliot’s brief essay, with some Kabbalistic and Talmudic terms thrown in for effect and in order to displace Eliot’s brand of high Anglophile Christianity with Bloom’s own New York Yiddish inheritance.
> Prospect, Jonathan Bate   25th May 2011  —  Issue 183 
> http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/tag/harold-bloom/
> 
> 
>  
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 4:40 PM, barbie gaze <barbiegaze at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I don't mean to be too hard on Mr. Rosen because of some silly quote, whether he belongs in such a camp is not for me to say.
>  
> And, who cares. One could structure a course on Romanticism and its critics around two works, one by Eliot and one by Bloom. Take Tradition and the Individual Talent and compare & contrast it with The Axiety of Influence and you have a very good start for a course of study. You could address the men, the authors, their biographies and contexts--including the influence of anti-Semitism on each.
> 
>