Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Harold Bloom returns

Harold Bloom died Monday, at 89, still inveighing against his enemies:
[Those whom] he called the "School of Resentment" -- critics and scholars he had previously described, in a 1991 Paris Review interview, as "displaced social workers" and "a rabblement of lemmings." (Dwight Garner, "A literary colossus," NYT, October 17, 2019)
I especially like the "displaced social workers" -- for I've long longed for the right expression (I've used "sociologists"), so I'm glad someone has already been there, and left planted there a sign for the ill-adversed . . .

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2 Comments:

At 4:05 AM, Blogger Carter Kaplan said...

Of course it depends upon ones perceptions, but I've always held that "Sociologist" was a superior formulation because it represents a theoretical science rather than the ordered implementation of arrived-upon policy (that is, "Social Work"), and, after all, isn't theoretical activity more descriptive of the English professor's task?

 
At 7:25 AM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

I was thinking more of "the ordered implementation of arrived-upon policy" that the social workers of literary criticism apply to get their works published.

Jeffery Hodges

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