Task: Sentiment Analysis
Input (English): Defeatist treatise on the process of canon formation . Harold Bloom, borrowing the metaphors and terminology of psychoanalysis, interprets the poet's relation to tradition in terms of an agonistic Oedipal struggle, arguing that the ("belated") poet's literary productions result from a conflict with a "strong" father figure with whom he must compete through a number of rhetorical phases representative of the "repression" of his own poetic self and the strong misreading (or "misprision", as Bloom calls it) of the work of a predecessor. Bloom's conception of the "canon" is a hierarchical, continuous and genealogical model of direct succession, as the young apprentice to the craft of literature subjects himself to self-imposed austerities, ridding himself of prematurely smug complacency, opening his text to the strong aura of the canon, and testing his productions against it. However, Bloom's argument is undercut by his own acknowledgement that many great writers can afford to nevertheless produce great literature by debunking the whole issue of influence, belatedness and originality, and allowing their works to flow forth from them spontaneously. This admission risks making the importance of the canon altogether trivial. Another difficulty is the understanding of many writers that the ideas of &quot;influence&quot; and &quot;tradition&quot; can entirely do away with the idea of belatedness, for the poet cannot be belated in a world of which he or she can still have an impact through writing and teaching. Bloom's defeatist reliance on canonical precedents, and his implicit regard that new writers have arrived too late in history to produce truly original works, reflects the postmodern &quot;fin-de-millennium&quot; langour that all sources of inspiration have been exhausted, and that we must abandon all hope of creating new works, but merely repeat the past. Not only are his conclusions totally untenable, but his whole treatise, on its insistence on returning to canonical precedents, fails to provide for a more dynamic, more forward-moving (as opposed to reversing, revising and troping) theory of poetry, a theory capable of affirming life and history more fully. It would be interesting to discover what Bloom would make of Henry Adams's remark: "Everything is respectable and nothing amusing. There are no outlaws.
Output (English): NEG