John Guillory - Professing Criticism : Essays on the Organization of Literary Study

John Guillory

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2022 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82129-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82130-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82131-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226821313.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of New York University and the Abraham and Rebecca Stein Faculty Publication Fund toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Guillory, John, author.

Title: Professing criticism : essays on the organization of literary study / John Guillory.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022012453 | ISBN 9780226821290 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226821306 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226821313 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: CriticismStudy and teaching. | HumanitiesStudy and teaching. | LiteratureHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC PN94.2.G85 2022 | DDC 801/.95071dc23/eng/20220510

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012453

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The title of this volume argues that if literature is studied in the university, it is criticism that is professed. My title alludes to that of Gerald Graffs landmark work, Professing Literature, which I have respectfully amended to bring out an unresolved problem in how literary study understands its purpose. The distinction between studying and professing is not trivial. University disciplines identify objects of study by differentiating these objects from others, by specialization, but professions establish the requisites and perquisites common to all the disciplines. As different as physics and literary study are, their disciplinary distinctions are submerged in the form of the profession, the notional parity of literature professors and physics professors. Where Graff offers an institutional history of our discipline, I attempt to analyze this history within the framework of a sociology of professions. The professionalization of disciplines organizes the work of teaching and research, a process that for literary study has been fraught with unintended consequences. The essays in this book consider how literary study has been organized, both historically and in the modern era, both before and after its professionalization. The sometimes adventitious and opportunistic solutions to problems in this volatile history have solidified into permanent features of our institutional landscape. For the most part, the discipline succeeds in its efforts to preserve, transmit, and study literature, yet it continues to be troubled by the relation between its disciplinary protocols and its identity as a profession. I argue in this book that the disciplines enthusiastic embrace of professionalism betrays an ambivalent relation to its amateur past, its earlier identity as criticism. Literary study attempts to resolve this ambivalence by professing criticism.

In the twentieth century, criticism was transformed into a discipline and a professionbut not in that order. As I demonstrate in of this book, our discipline inverted the usual sequence between these two processes: Literary study became a profession before it became a discipline. Driving this anomalous sequence was the belated attempt to determine the object of study in the English and modern foreign language departments, which only during the interwar period were identified with literature. The study of literature is very old, one of the oldest in Western history, but the object of the discipline, as we know, wavered in the later nineteenth century between literature and language. It was not obvious that literature was a legitimate object of disciplinary study, whereas the vernacular languages could boast a highly developed body of scholarship, an undoubted entitlement to the status of a discipline. So uncertain was the process of defining an object that for several decades in the earlier twentieth century, the discipline had no settled name at all. Teaching and research into literature were poised to achieve disciplinary status with the choice of a surprising array of names: philology, belles lettres, rhetoric, literary history. When the discipline was finally baptized, in the period after World War II, it took a new name: literary criticism.

This story is well known; it is in essence what Graffs institutional history reveals. And yet when we look at this account from the comparative perspective of other disciplines, its oddity is the chief impression. One might suppose that literature is the inevitable correspondent to the objects that define the most nearly allied disciplines of art history and music history. Even today, however, the position of literature as disciplinary object is not wholly secure, as Graff acknowledges in a new preface to his book: The very phrase teaching literature is misleading, since what teachers and students produce in literature courses is not literature, but criticismthat is, discourse about literature.

The currency of the term literary criticism is a legacy of I. A. Richardss transformative intervention into literary pedagogy. Richards saw literary criticism as a practice that could be put on a scientific basis, which would certainly have established its disciplinary credentials, but Richards did not see himself as establishing a corps of professional critics. Literary criticism was on the contrary regarded as a practice in which every reader of literature was engaged; criticism was another name for reading, whether done well or badly. His successors saw the possibility of the moment differently. In the famous statement of John Crowe Ransom, Rather than occasional criticism by amateurs, I should think the whole enterprise might be seriously taken in hand by professionals. The chapters of this volume ask, What does it mean to profess criticism? This question has never, in my view, been systematically addressed in the context of a sociology of professions. It is my hope that this framework of analysis will help to explain the perennial churn in literary study, the constant revolutionizing of its methods and objects, the agon of its professional identification. I should say at the outset, however, that my intention is not to come down in favor or disfavor of professionalism. I take the profession of criticism as given, an accomplished fact, but no less subject to analysis for that reason.

The chapters in this collection were composed initially in the hope of producing a sociologically informed history of literary study, a history that would proceed as a linear narrative. That plan ultimately proved impractical, largely because of my limitations as a scholar of English literature. The asymmetric relation between English and the modern foreign languages in the Anglo-American university makes the history of literary study very difficult to integrate into one narrative. For related reasons, the converging and diverging histories of British and American literary study are equally difficult to integrate. I write, therefore, as an American scholar of English literature, acknowledging where possible prior or parallel developments in the history of literary study in the United Kingdom and in modern foreign languages. Some moments in the story, such as the work of I. A. Richards already mentioned, were assimilated in the United States differently than in the country of their origin, where the university system permitted a more casual relation to the procedures of credentialization. For better or worse, British universities have more than caught up in recent decades with their American peers in the effort to professionalize university teaching; it is my hope that my analysis will prove relevant to that convergence in the end.