A friend sent me a Newsweek url this morning to ask me, “just what is it about Harry Potter that Harold Bloom can’t stand?” It is a good question. America’s leading literary critic of the last three decades has made repeated references to the “slop” of writing in these books and cited the books as evidence of a growing “sub-literacy” in popular culture.
Check out the delight with which this critic of Harry Potter cites Bloom in his essay, Harry Potter and the Money Making Machine, that appeared in The Herald (UK):
The Harry Potter books are, as entertainment, inoffensive. But they’re not literature; they’re middle-brow pot-boilers. I will not presume to go as far as the great Yale professor, Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, who said of J K Rowling’s work: “The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character stretched his legs’. I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.” [Read more…]
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