gr8 werk

Great scholarship divides and polarizes opinion. Mikhail Bakhtin's doctoral thesis is a prime example. The assessment committee was divided. Half of them thought it was rubbish - insane nonsense. Half of them thought it was a work of genius of the highest order. Things got so heated the whole town was divided and the authorities had to be called in. 

Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence is another good example. He shared it with some of his colleagues just to test the waters and they advised him not to publish it. It was too 'out there'. They told him, whatever this is, it is not literary criticism. But he went ahead and published it.

Bloom's colleagues were right, in a way. It wasn't really literary criticism as they knew it. Same with Bakhtin's works. They're strange and not what we expect. There's a poetic quality about these texts. 

The best works redefine the field. We don't even know the extent of our debt to Harold Bloom. We take it for granted that there are 6 great English poets of Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, but that's only because Bloom insisted on it.