[lbo-talk] Wolf and Bloom

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Feb 25 07:54:30 PST 2004


Doug Henwood wrote:
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> [clip]
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> Bloom was never intellectually lazy.
>

I'd have to review some of my notes to be sure of this, but if my memory of his work on Milton is correct, that work was mostly a symptom of intellectual laziness. He knew Milton well enough for the purposes of recognizing Miltonic influence on later work (necessary for his _Anxiety of Influence_), but not well enough for some of his sweeping commentaries directly on Milton.

It is quite possible for a scholar -- especially a scholar with a superstar reputation,* especially a scholar with a _deserved_ superstar reputation -- to exploit that reputation with really sloppy work outside his/her area of specialization. Bloom was -- sort of -- a Milton specialist, but he abused the privilege.

Carrol

*I forget the name now, but there was (mid-century) a high-powered textual scholar (I think from Virginia) who wrote a pretentious essay on _Paradise Lost_ in which he made some elementary mistakes in mere construal of the facts of the narrative. Probably there are many other examples.



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