Harold Bloom is one of the most prolific and controversial literary critics now living. A professor at Yale for over fifty years and the author of over nineteen books, what makes Bloom controversial is not the way he wields the latest methodological trends, but the way he eschews them. In academic circles, Bloom is at once the grandaddy of us all and--to cop a Rowling phrase--He Who Must Not Be Named: a truly learned scholar who truly loves and knows literature and truly despises those who pretend to expertise by slinging around meaningless jargon and unearned judgement.

Bloom's latest book, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, occasioned a telling interview with the Atlantic Unbound. Some excerpts:

If you spend a lifetime reading and teaching and writing, I would think that the proper attitude to take toward Shakespeare, toward Dante, toward Cervantes, toward Geoffrey Chaucer, toward Tolstoy, toward Platoóthe great figuresóis indeed awe, wonder, gratitude, deep appreciation. I can't really understand any other stance in relation to them. I mean, they have formed our minds. And Hamlet is the most special of special cases. I've been accused of "bardolotry" so much that I've made a joke out of it. As I am something of a dinosaur, I've named myself Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator. It's not such a bad thing to be.

[...]

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 To a rather considerable extent, literary studies have been replaced by that incredible absurdity called cultural studies which, as far as I can tell, are neither cultural nor are they studies.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.

You know, the term "philology" originally meant indeed a love of learningóa 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.

[...]

I've so talked myself to exhaustion with a sort of rant against cant that I'm reluctant to say much about it. Throughout the English-speaking world, the wave of French theory was replaced by the terrible mÈlange that I increasingly have come to call the School of Resentmentóthe 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 payóno 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.

I'm a bit of an oddball, having been trained by an intermediary generation of ideologues to be a theoretical clone (genus: cultural studies; species: body critic). Academically, I was raised to belong to the Rabblement of Lemmings. For a number of years, without fully realizing it, I rabbled along lemming-like, thinking that what I was doing was scholarly. I finally figured things out, but I would never have done so alone. I was lucky. I met someone with a shit detector and no fear. He let me know that academically, I was full of shit. I crapped on him for it for years. It was easier thus. But I eventually managed to put my considerable pride in a box where it belonged and began to undergo the humbling process of realizing just what a foolish parody of a scholar I was. No matter that this was what I had been trained to be and rewarded for being: you don't feel less a fool for realizing that everyone around you is one too.

My point: most younger academic sorts aren't lucky like I was. They don't see the world they belong to clearly--they are too close to it and they entered it too young. And they don't have anyone they can trust to tell them the truth. So they live in an atmosphere of posturing and lies, copying the styles of the celebrities in their field because they are the styles of celebrities and adopting the standard approved theoretical methods of the day because they are the standard approved methods. And they become not learned, but polished; not expert, but slick; not scholars, but showpeople.

Meanwhile, in every department, an older generation of "dinosaurs" looks on, seeing it all, and saying nothing. They do this to minimize the open displays of contempt for their traditional ways that they have learned to expect as their due. But they shouldn't. There are younger wanna-be scholars out there who want to hear the truth, and who will feel rightly betrayed when they discover--if they discover--that there were people in their midst who were positioned to level with them, but did not.