perfidy

In an interview in The Atlantic Unbound:

I left the English department twenty-six years ago. I just divorced them and became, as I like to put it, Professor of Absolutely Nothing. To a rather considerable extent, literary studies have been replaced by that incredible absurdity called cultural studies which, as far as I can tell, are neither cultural nor are they studies. But there has always been an arrogance, I think, of the semi-learned.

Ow!

Love him or hate him, Harold Bloom knows what he is talking about.

I almost wrote this: "His scholarship is motivated by the purest thing of all: love of the material. " Yet that's not right. Harold Bloom does love what he does, and what he studies, but so do many rat bastid deconstructionists. Good intentions are no indicator of results, in academia or anywhere else. No, Harold Bloom is just a fiercely articulate, extremely intelligent, discerning and iconoclastic scholar who just happens to have a sense of perspective that ecofeminism tends to lack completely.

The key to why this is comes in what Blooms says next:

You know, the term "philology" originally meant indeed a love of learning—a love of the word, a love of literature. I think the more profoundly people love and understand literature, the less likely they are to be supercilious, to feel that somehow they know more than the poems, stories, novels, and epics actually know. And, of course, we have this nonsense called Theory with a capital T, mostly imported from the French and now having evilly taken root in the English-speaking world. And that, I suppose, also has encouraged absurd attitudes toward what we used to call imaginative literature.

Bloom here makes a point that I have made far less gracefully in the past: capital-T Theory is a crutch. It allows students (and professors!) to move forward arrogantly in a state of semi-comprehension, reading a work only deeply enough to discern how they may fit it into the framework of their choice. Of course, Theory only exists because some French smartasses hoped to find a way to observe the universe "objectively," that is, divorced from the innate prejudices of their own perceptions. Bloom, rather ingeniously (but, sadly, not obviously), cuts through the problem of objectivity by reveling in the experience of reading and understanding-- he places the self, the way that literature works on you the reader, front and center. Maybe this is as it should be, because if all interpretation is ultimately bullshit, why shouldn't you stick to your own rather than use someone else's?

Anyway, read the whole thing. It's great. I leave you with one last bit:

Throughout the English-speaking world, the wave of French theory was replaced by the terrible mélange that I increasingly have come to call the School of Resentment—the so-called multiculturalists and feminists who tell us we are to value a literary work because of the ethnic background or the gender of the author. 

Feminism as a stance calling for equal rights, equal education, equal pay—no rational, halfway decent human being could possibly disagree with this. But what is called feminism in the academies seems to be a very different phenomenon indeed. I have sometimes characterized these people as a Rabblement of Lemmings, dashing off the cliff and carrying their supposed subject down to destruction with them.

This isn't scholarship! This isn't learning! This is lazy!

And this is why I will not go back for my Doctorate.