"The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective"
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Bloom’s complaint lands with the weary bite of someone who’s watched the academy trade its most basic pleasure - reading well - for a bureaucratic performance of relevance. The opening move is deliberately deflationary: history, he suggests, doesn’t progress; it accumulates. “The world gets older” is a shrug at both utopian politics and nostalgia. Literature, too, doesn’t “improve” in any simple upward arc. That’s Bloom resisting the two temptations he spent a career fighting: the idea that culture is redeemed by the future, and the idea that the canon is a museum of dead greatness.
Then comes the real target: “the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies.” The insult isn’t just aesthetic. “Drab” implies grayness of spirit, a drained sensibility; “passes for” suggests imposture, an institution keeping up appearances while abandoning the core craft. The subtext is Bloom’s long war with theory-and-politics-first criticism (his polemics against what he called the “School of Resentment”), where texts become pretexts for moral sorting, ideological signaling, or professionalized jargon.
The most interesting turn is the final clause: “will finally provide its own corrective.” He’s betting on exhaustion. Academic fashions, in Bloom’s view, collapse under their own monotony; students, readers, and even scholars eventually hunger for the thing being neglected - aesthetic power, strangeness, difficulty, pleasure. It’s a grudging optimism, but not about institutions becoming enlightened. It’s about attention reasserting itself once the talk around literature becomes too thin to live on.
Then comes the real target: “the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies.” The insult isn’t just aesthetic. “Drab” implies grayness of spirit, a drained sensibility; “passes for” suggests imposture, an institution keeping up appearances while abandoning the core craft. The subtext is Bloom’s long war with theory-and-politics-first criticism (his polemics against what he called the “School of Resentment”), where texts become pretexts for moral sorting, ideological signaling, or professionalized jargon.
The most interesting turn is the final clause: “will finally provide its own corrective.” He’s betting on exhaustion. Academic fashions, in Bloom’s view, collapse under their own monotony; students, readers, and even scholars eventually hunger for the thing being neglected - aesthetic power, strangeness, difficulty, pleasure. It’s a grudging optimism, but not about institutions becoming enlightened. It’s about attention reasserting itself once the talk around literature becomes too thin to live on.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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