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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Guillory, John, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Criticism--Study and teaching.

Criticism.

Humanities--Study and teaching.

Humanities.

Literature--History and criticism.

Literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xvi, 407 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Summary:

"As the humanities in higher education struggle with a jobs crisis and declining enrollments, the travails of "English" have been especially acute and long-standing. No scholar has analyzed the discipline's contradictions as authoritatively as John Guillory, whose 1993 book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation remains a classic and whose subsequent essays on the profession of literary study have been widely cited. In this much-anticipated new book, Guillory shows how literary study has been organized, both historically and in the modern era, both before and after its professionalization. The traces of this volatile history, he shows, have solidified into permanent features of the university. Yet the discipline 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 In a series of essays, several previously unpublished, Guillory unpacks what it means to "profess criticism." His book gives a timely and 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: pt. One The Formation and Deformation of Literary Study

ch. 1 The Institution of Professions

ch. 2 Professing Criticism

ch. 3 Critique of Critical Criticism

pt. Two Organizing Literature: Foundations, Antecedents, Consequences

ch. 4 Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities

ch. 5 The Postrhetorical Condition

ch. 6 Two Failed Disciplines: Belles Lettres and Philology

ch. 7 The Location of Literature

ch. 8 The Contradictions of Global English

pt. Three Professionalization and Its Discontents

ch. 9 On the Permanent Crisis of Graduate Education

ch. 10 Evaluating Scholarship in the Humanities

ch. 11 Composition and the Demand for Writing

ch. 12 The Question of Lay Reading.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226821290

0226821293

9780226821306

0226821307

OCLC:

1304399742