Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study

Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study

A sociological history of literary study—both as a discipline and as a profession. As the humanities in higher education struggle with a labor crisis and with declining enrollments, the travails of literary study are especially profound. No scholar has analyzed the discipline’s contradictions as authoritatively as John Guillory. In this much-anticipated new book, Guillory shows how the study of literature has been organized, both historically and in the modern era, both before and after its professionalization. The traces of this volatile history, he reveals, have solidified into permanent features of the university. Literary study continues to be troubled by the relation between discipline and profession, both in its ambivalence about the literary object and in its anxious embrace of a professionalism that betrays the discipline’s relation to its amateur precursor: criticism. In a series of timely essays, Professing Criticism offers an incisive explanation for the perennial churn in literary study, the constant revolutionizing of its methods and objects, and the permanent crisis of its professional identification. It closes with a robust outline of five key rationales for literary study, offering a credible account of the aims of the discipline and a reminder to the professoriate of what they already do, and often do well. “In  Professing Criticism , [Guillory] takes on an even bigger question: What is literary criticism—specifically, the kind of highly specialized, theoretically sophisticated textual readings generated by academic critics—really  for ?" -- Jennifer Schuessler ― The New York Times " Professing Criticism  is a sociology of criticism, an argument about how, during the twentieth century, the practice evolved from a wide-ranging amateur pursuit, requiring no specialist training or qualifications, into a profession and a discipline housed within the academy. . . . The profession of literary study as it is currently institutionalized in the university may not be the place from which the journey toward a future criticism begins. To sit alongside Guillory on his high perch, or maybe a branch or two higher, is not to dream of the past or to mourn the present. It is to scan new horizons for the second coming of the critic." -- Merve Emre ― The New Yorker "The most penetrating, and in some ways most original, study we have of the forces that have shaped the history of literary study, especially in the US. . . .  Professing Criticism  does not fit any familiar category: it is the work of an original intelligence taking seriously the various responsibilities involved in trying to understand how the present state of literary study emerged out of its history." -- Stefan Collini ― London Review of Books "For those of us who value not only literature but the idiosyncratic legacy of academic literary studies, Guillory does not bring good or welcome news. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong." -- Evan Kindley ― New York Review of Books "[Guillory’s] goal is to understand how the practice of criticism, which flourished in the journalism of the 19th century, became a university discipline. . . . The questions Guillory poses have a long history but a new urgency before what seems like a precipice: Will literary studies continue as a professional activity, and if so, in what form? And might professionalism itself inhibit the changes that need to happen in the field?" -- Nicholas Dames ― The Nation "Three decades ago, Guillory’s influential Cultural Capital attacked the whole premise of the canon wars. The combatants assumed that it mattered meaningfully for creation of an inclusive social world what people read in literature classrooms. They mistook or substituted the exclusionary classroom for a possibly inclusive social world. These arguments are revisited and deepened in Professing Criticism , which warns against examining 'the school' in isolation from the total world." -- Sarah Brouillette ― Public Books "Professing Criticism  will set the terms of discussion about the English department for a long time. But it will resonate outwards, too — historians of the humanities writ large will find in this book enormous resources, though they will need to be translated carefully from one disciplinary setting to others." ― The Chronicle of Higher Education “If there is a more thoughtful, penetrating, insightful, trenchant, acerbic, scathing or original analysis of a scholarly discipline than John Guillory’s Professing Criticism , I have yet to see it. Partly a history and in part a sociology of English as a profession, Professing Criticism is an extraordinary book, truly a landmark work of scholarship and interpretation.”   ― Inside Higher Ed “ Professing Criticism  offers a brilliantly exacting, politically confronting analysis of why the study of literature is unlike other disciplines of the university and what its distinctive history means for its ability to serve a c