Specters of Bloom

Abstract

Specters of Bloom Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) It's not like Ji-Yoon Kim was pining her entire career to be a department chair—and then finally became one. Rather, like many who end up as chairs, when the department calls your number to serve, you oblige. Ready or not, it often appears to be an offer too good to refuse. The Chair (2021) is a Netflix series that follows the fictive life of a newly appointed English department chair of Pembroke College. Professor Kim is played by Sandra Oh, who is well known for her roles as Cristina Yang on the medical drama series Grey's Anatomy and as Eve Polastri in the spy thriller series Killing Eve. Here she is cast as the first Asian American woman chair of her Ivy League English department. Given Oh's star power, it is a role with the potential to inspire many. At the beginning of the series, she gives a rousing speech in defense of the humanities to her colleagues at her first departmental meeting as chair. Her speech includes the second line from Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why (2000). "Information is endlessly available to us," writes Bloom; "where shall wisdom be found?" However, by the sixth and final episode of the first season, her actions as chair have played out some of the consequences of the search for wisdom in the information age. The faculty are again meeting with her as chair, but by this time the bloom has fallen off the rose of her new administrative role—and she is given a vote of no confidence by her colleagues. Worse yet, the seeds of her undoing are for the most part not sown by others. Rather, they are the outcomes of her decisions as chair. Chief among them is her decision to appoint as chair of the departmental promotion and tenure committee of her African American colleague, Yasmin McKay (Nana Mensah), a senior colleague in her field whose vision of it is totally different from Professor McKay's. While McKay represents the new socially and politically progressive vision of the humanities, Elliot Rentz's (Bob Balaban) vision is more like that of Bloom than Toni Morrison. Bloom, who fought hard in the PC wars of the 1990s against a socially and politically progressive vision of the humanities, described Morrison as "a self-proclaimed African American Marxist and feminist" in whose work [End Page 22] he "hear[s] a totalizing ideology." Yet for Bloom, "to read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all." This is a position with which Professor Rentz would wholeheartedly agree. He is presented in The Chair as a scholar who has not changed his view of Melville one iota in the last thirty years. Professor McKay, however, represents a vision of the humanities that is the polar opposite of both Rentz and Bloom. Unlike Rentz, not only is she presented in the series as more than willing to discuss Melville's rumored domestic abuse with her students at Pembroke, she utilizes a progressive pedagogy that allows her students to express their views on the author however they see fit, including through rap. The result is that while McKay's class enrollments in American literature are busting through the ceiling, Rentz's have tanked. In terms of their approach to teaching and scholarship, Rentz is portrayed as the image of literary studies past, whereas McKay is its future. Still, the new chair quickly comes to realize that appointing Rentz to oversee McKay's tenure committee is tantamount to denying McKay tenure. Why? Because Rentz, like Bloom, is never going to assent to McKay's approach to literature. While putting Rentz in charge of McKay's tenure case initially made sense to Kim, particularly as she quotes Bloom not Morrison to her colleagues at that first meeting, afterward she realizes that placing Rentz in this role is to ask for the same response that Bloom would have to McKay's approach to Melville, namely, to reject it as a form of socially and politically progressive scholarship that has no place in the study of literature—and is not...