I seem to recall a trope or literary character representing someone working on a dry, boring work of abstruse scholarship. I thought it might be Middlemarch's Casaubon, but I don't think he quite fits the bill (he was actually something of a sham, not having the necessary German...)
The person I have in mind would be an ivory tower academic working on, for example, a ten-volume history of earthworms; not entirely pointless, but totally disconnected from any real-world relevance.