Magni Formica Laboris

( from a recent interview with Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian ) AVC: You’ve been extremely critical of the politicization of teaching literature… HB: Critical, young man, is hardly the word. I stand against it like Jeremiah prophesying in Jerusalem. It has destroyed most of university culture. The teaching of high literature now hardly exists in the United States. The academy is in ruins, and they’ve destroyed themselves Source: http://www.avclub.com/articles/harold-bloom-on-blood-meridian,29214/ I showed Zack this quote and neither of us are certain of what "the politicization of teaching literature" actually is, can anyone throw light on this?

Learning from Art: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as a Critique of Divine Determinism by Dennis Sansom [after examples of Voltaire's Candide critiquing Leibniz's optimism, Huxley's Brave New World critiquing Marxism] The artist’s imagination, especially in literature, pictures what can happen. Aristotle may be right in saying that art imposes an ideational form upon matter, but art can also indicate whether an ideational form should be imposed upon matter. In keeping with Aristotle’s terminology, the actuality of the idea may pervert or hinder the potentiality of the matter. Some ideas do not fulfill the potentiality of the human experience and they should be rejected, though they are logical, systematic, and clear. Some philosophical ideas cannot stand the test of the imagination. How does the artistic imagination test an idea? The artistic imagination is not just a fanciful thought experiment or a mirror of experience. In the Critique of Judgement Kant argued that artis

In the "Old Man" sections of The Wild Palms (1939), the flood throws forth its "charging welter of dead cows and mules and outhouses and cabins and hencoops." Faulkner's prose strikes an elegiac note as the convict's skiff rides "even upon the backs of the mules as though even in death they were not to escape that burden-bearing doom with which their eunuch race was cursed" (145-46). in Blood Meridian (1985) … having a mule drowned intentionally: "The Yumas were swimming the few sorry mules ... across the river. . . . Downriver they'd drowned one of the animals and towed it ashore to be butchered" (253). … That the image of the drowned mule also occupies a subliterary folk status in the South is perhaps attested by a common simile in which a wealthy person is said to have "enough money to burn up a wet mule." 6. Falls from cliffs. The novel Blood Meridian (1985) establishes Cormac McCarthy as unchallenged king of literary mu

Achinstein's definition of scientific realism: a doctrine committed at least to the claim that unobservable entities exist. Three alternative definitions: (1) Scientific realism is a view about truth and reference in scientific theories generally. (Psillos, Laudan, Boyd). They are committed to at least the following claims: (A) Scientific theories (at least in the "mature" sciences) are typically approximately true, and more recent theories are closer to the truth than other theories in the same domain. (B) The observational and theoretical terms within the theories of a mature science genuinely refer (roughly, there are substances in the world which correspond to the ontologies presumed by our best theories). (C) Successive theories in any mature science will be such that they "preserve" the theoretical relations and the apparent referents of earlier theories (that is, earlier theories will be "limiting cases" of later theories). (D) Acceptable n