Acadecadence

I'm known to have a distaste for humanities academia and the alleged "research" that goes on involving no new discovery of new sources, or any scientific statistical word analysis even, just selectively quoting already picked-over texts to prove subtle points that aren't important anyway and which can never be known with any sort of certainty.

I was reading the wikipedia article on Harold Bloom and found something I like:

His position is that politics have no place in literary criticism: a feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but probably nothing about Hamlet itself.

Frankly, I think that's true of most "academic" "critical readings" of texts. They'll tell you a lot about the "researcher" himself and the academic fads in place at the time, but little about the text itself beyond mentally masturbatory conjecture, and usually in a register that is both incredibly snooty and boring.