If you think you are brilliant as an academic, what about Lorca or Coltrane, what about them? What word would you use for that? I'm not talking about any false humility. You can be a smart academic and realize that. But if you are a brilliant theory super star what do you do with someone in a wholly different category? You could be the best Nietzsche scholar but then where do you put Nietzsche himself? I'm not try to bring back the apparatus of the "genius," but if you think of yourself that way then how can you be so eager to tear down that apparatus?
I'm not saying a Dante scholar can't be brilliant and all that, or that criticism and theory are inferior to the truly creative arts. A second rate creative artist is still second rate and will even seem a bit dumb to a smart academic. What I'm saying is we can't have the second hand brilliance of Bloom and then claim it as our own.
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Would you call Butler and Ronell "philosophers" - ?
They are not even in field and I wouldn't call every philosophy professor a philosopher, even.
*I* am brilliant but I am underdeveloped, so I do not shine and am not as brilliant as I might be. What is brilliance?
I have always thought I was a literary scholar, not a literary critic; I think of criticism as harder, more artistic, than scholarship and don't know that I am up to it, but I also note that critics don't have all the training of scholars, necessarily, and we have our own value
Relationship of scholars / critics to artists -- we are studying them but they are also colleagues, except that a bad artist isn't as interesting as a non-great scholar, because at least that non-great scholar has some knowledge ... I don't know.
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