John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, out in January from the University of Chicago Press, promises to be a landmark in the study of higher education. Or perhaps an epitaph. This sprawling amalgam of disciplinary history with the sociology of institutions would be of interest even if the future of its subject, academic literary study, were assured. But the book, which largely collects and reworks essays published over the last three decades, gains a note of poignant urgency because the topic it devotes so much learning and intelligence to may well be in permanent eclipse. Although Guillory is analytically detached about the fact that, as he says, large and irremediable forces “have irreversibly transformed the social conditions of literary study and relegated literature to a smaller place in the educational system and in society,” the attentive reader will hear Guillory’s characteristically subdued lament.
Professing Criticism understands that the transformations it tracks are too complex to be attributed to any single cause, and depending on which chapter you’re in, different aspects of the total crisis can seem most decisive. Is literary study the victim of the “proliferation of new media” and what Michael Warner, in a passage Guillory quotes, calls the “widespread disenchantment with the idea of literature, which students in a technologically changing climate increasingly encounter as archaic”? Or is the threat rather such “externalities” as “the defunding of higher education by the states, the growth of administration and ongoing ‘corporatization’ of the university, and a redirection of resources toward competition between schools”? Or, the most painful possibility, is the problem internal to literary study itself, which has attempted to compensate for a worry about the irrelevance of its object by exaggerated claims of social critique and political topicality — resulting in what Guillory calls an “old-fashioned legitimation crisis”?
Guillory’s answer is all of the above and more. He hopes that a wide-enough view — Stefan Collini, in an admiring review, calls it “aerial” — will show how disparate forces “mesh like a smooth set of gears.” But when you focus on any given portion of the whole, tensions emerge. Sarah Brouillette, in her review for Public Books, puts her finger on one of those tensions:
Though the breadth of Guillory’s history is wide, he is careful to indicate that the conditions for the study of English are increasingly bad just now, and he skewers other scholars ... for somehow managing to think that it was “suspicious reading” and not student debt that drove people out of the English department. It seems like a strange shift, then, when he argues that the contemporary crisis is actually “not the one that usually goes by this name — the collapse of the job market for Ph.D.s, funding reductions, or a decline in the number of majors — but rather the one that is internal to the development of the discipline, the question of its justification.”
Collini, too, suggests that internal and external explanations for the “crisis” are implicitly at odds, although he does not accuse Guillory of incoherence on that score, presumably because Guillory’s internalist account is subtler than that of the conservatives Collini chastises. “Right-wing culture-warriors,” Collini writes, “love to claim that it’s no wonder students are deserting the subject when academics are replacing the English classics with third-rate expressions of identity politics, but the truth is that the damage is due to the socio-economic policies those same political figures have promoted.” Conservative funding cuts and perceived labor-market demands are to blame for the humanities’ plight.
