Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study Spiral-Bound |

John Guillory

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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.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Original Binding: Paperback
Pages: 464 pages
ISBN-10: 0226821307
Item Weight: 1.08 lbs
Dimensions: 6.0 x 1.0 x 9.0 inches
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“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
John Guillory is the Julius Silver Professor of English at New York University. He is coeditor of What's Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory and author of Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History and Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, the latter of which is also published by the University of Chicago Press.