Academia Has Ruined Literary Criticism

“John Guillory’s new book, “Professing Criticism” (Chicago), an erudite and occasionally biting series of essays on “the organization of literary study.””

“Guillory has spent much of his career explaining how works of literature are enjoyed, assessed, interpreted, and taught; he is best known for his landmark work, “Cultural Capital” (1993), which showed how literary evaluation draws authority from the institutions—principally universities—within which it is practiced”

“To suggest, for instance, that minor poets were superior to major ones, as T. S. Eliot did, or that the best modernist poetry was inferior to the best modernist prose, as Harold Bloom did, meant little unless these judgments could be made to stick—that is, unless there were mechanisms for transmitting these judgments to other readers”

““Cultural Capital” emerged when literature departments were in the throes of the “canon wars.””

“Guillory’s insight was that these differences of opinion were, at root, almost secondary, less structural than cosmetic”

“Progressives and conservatives alike were participating in a system whose main function was the production of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital”: the distinctive styles of speaking, writing, and reading that marked degree holders as members of the educated class”

“To be the kind of person who could translate the Iliad in 1880, or do a close reading of a poem in 1950, or “queer” a work in 2010, was to be manifestly the product of a university, and to reap economic and social rewards because of it”

“If “Cultural Capital” was a sociology of judgment, then “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”

“Professionalization, he argues, secured intellectual autonomy for criticism’s practitioners. They could produce knowledge about literature in a manner intelligible chiefly to others producing the same kind of knowledge—a project that became both increasingly specialized and increasingly justified by political concerns, such as race, gender, equality, and the environment”

““This is a world in which some of us can specialize in the study of cultural artifacts, and within this category to specialize in literary artifacts, and within literature to specialize in English, and within English to specialize in Romanticism, and within this period to specialize in ecocriticism of Romantic poetry,” Guillory writes.”

“The cost of this professional autonomy is influence. “How far beyond the classroom, or beyond the professional society of the teachers and scholars, does this effort reach?” he asks, knowing that the answer is: not far at all”

“The professoriat has struggled to demonstrate a connection between the skills cultivated in literature classrooms and those required by the professional-managerial jobs that many students are destined for”

“The result is a tale of two crises—the economically driven “crisis of the humanities” and what Guillory calls a “crisis of legitimation” among the professoriat”

“the hard truth is that no reader needs literary works interpreted for her, certainly not in the professionalized language of the literary scholar”

“a distinct genre of writing called “criticism” first appeared in the late seventeenth century. The earliest critics were the descendants of the Renaissance humanists—editors and translators well versed in the art and literature of antiquity, from which they derived the standards they used to judge modern works”

“Theirs was a “Science of Criticism,” Lewis Theobald, a fastidious editor of Shakespeare’s plays, declared in 1733. It consisted of three duties: “Emendation of corrupt Passages,” “Explanation of obscure and difficult ones,” and “Inquiry into the Beauties and Defects of Composition.””

“The great critic’s expertise was based on his own authority. He pronounced his judgments with passion and conviction, in a voice that drew to his side the figure that first Johnson, then Woolf, celebrated as the common reader”

“Creating and commanding this readership, the critic enjoyed considerable freedom in the choice of topics he addressed and the manner in which he addressed them—with “the downright vigour of a Dryden, or Keats with his fine and natural bearing, his profound insight and sanity, or Flaubert and the tremendous power of his fanaticism,” Woolf wrote”

“So prestigious were the Romantic and Victorian sages, Guillory observes, “that all of literature aspired to the condition of criticism (in Arnold’s famous phrase, the ‘criticism of life’).””

“At the height of its cultural renown, criticism was no handmaiden to literature; it was its partner, its equal in substance and style, its superior in its capacity to enter the world beyond the page and the imagination”

“Yet, at the turn of the twentieth century, something strange happened, something that, by 1925, led Woolf to look around and lament the sudden absence of greatness. “Reviewers we have but no critic; a million competent and incorruptible policemen but no judge. Men of taste and learning and ability are for ever lecturing the young,” she wrote. “But the too frequent result of their able and industrious pens is a desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones.””

“Hovering just outside the frame of these damning sentences is the institution of the academy, the place where lectures and dissections were undertaken, and where the social order—and criticism along with it—was transformed by the rise of the profession”

“Professionalization, as the sociologist Magali Sarfatti Larson defined it, was “the process by which producers of special services sought to constitute and control a market for their expertise.” They did this by making entry into the labor market contingent on formal training and credentials. Starting in the nineteenth century, professional training began moving beyond simple apprenticeships—shadowing senior physicians or “reading the law”—and into the lecture halls of newly established schools”

“By the first decades of the twentieth century, national organizations had established standards for the credentialling of lawyers, doctors, and nurses”

“The professionalization of criticism, according to Guillory, was a less coherent affair, because criticism did not belong to a single trade or discipline. Unlike the scientific or technical fields of the university, it had no replicable method and no exemplary problem that needed to be solved. Instead, Guillory writes, it offered its practitioners “a constellation of objects”—poems, philosophical tracts, altarpieces—that call “to us across the long time of human existence.””

“It was in the university that the first professional readers emerged. The Renaissance humanists metamorphosed into classicists and rhetoricians (guardians of dead languages); the early modern editors into philologists and literary historians (pedantic, narrow, dry); and the Romantic and Victorian sages into belle-lettrists (idiosyncratic, overwrought, a little melancholy)”

“Then, starting around the nineteen-thirties, there was an attempt to integrate this pantheon of characters into a single identity: the Scholar-Critic”

“The Scholar-Critic attached criticism to a specifically literary object and to a method—close reading, inspired by I. A. Richards in his book “Practical Criticism.””

“This method was reflected in a work product, the interpretive essay, and together they formed the cornerstone of most literature classes”

“Close reading branched out into many methods of reading—rhetorical reading for the deconstructionists, symptomatic reading for the Marxists, reparative reading for the queer theorists—culminating in what has been called the “method wars.””

“But the method wars, Guillory argues, really represented a willingness to settle for “no method.””

“None of these practices were replicable in a scientific sense; no literary scholar could attempt to corroborate the results of, say, a feminist critique of “Jane Eyre.”

“Furthermore, criticism became more interested in its own protocols than in what Guillory calls “the verbal work of art.” Discussions of how a novel or a poem worked were less valuable than whatever historical or political occurrences it manifested. The aims of criticism and of scholarship diverged”

“The final phase of criticism’s arc began with the rise of a figure that Roger Kimball memorably described as the “tenured radical,” and which we might think of as the Scholar-Activist”

“In Guillory’s account, this chronology serves as the backdrop against which he draws a social and psychological sketch of the scholar, a specimen who appears, from all angles, to be hideously deformed. If there is a thesis that unites the essays in “Professing Criticism,” it is that professional formation entails a corresponding “déformation professionnelle.””

“Any kind of occupational training imparts to its recipients both a sense of mastery and a certain obliviousness to what this mastery costs—namely, the loss of other ways of perceiving the world. Related terms are “occupational psychosis” (John Dewey), “trained incapacity” (Thorstein Veblen), and, most recently, “nerdview” (Geoffrey K. Pullum), all more openly pejorative than “deformation.””

“Yet they get at the anxious and somewhat pitiable aspects of professional scholars (especially when one encounters them in herds) that Guillory, a model of courtesy and tact, sidesteps”

“All professionals are deformed; every professional is deformed in his own way. The funniest and angriest commentator on the deformation of scholars was surely Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Guillory cites”

“In “The Gay Science,” Nietzsche writes:

In a scholar’s book there is nearly always something oppressive, oppressed: the “specialist” emerges somehow—his eagerness, his seriousness, his ire, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunchback—every specialist has his hump. Every scholarly book also reflects a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked. Look at the friends of your youth again, after they have taken possession of their specialty—Alas, in every case the reverse has also taken place! . . . One is the master of one’s trade at the price of also being its victim”

“This scholar was a furious being, at once thwarted by his mastery and passionately, obsessively wedded to it”

“Today, in academe, one looks around with dismay at what a century of professionalization has wrought—the mastery, yes, but also the bureaucratic pettiness, the clumsily concealed resentment, the quickness to take offense, and the piety, oh, the piety!”

“The contemporary literary scholar, Guillory tells us, is marked by an inflated sense of the urgency and importance of his work. This professional narcissism is the flip side of an insecurity about his work’s social value, an anxiety that scholarly work, no matter how thoughtful, stylish, or genuinely interesting, has no discernible effect on the political problems that preoccupy him”

“Of all the pressures on professional formation faced by literary scholars today, perhaps the most intense is the fear of exclusion from the profession altogether”

“Guillory’s book is sure to rouse strong feelings in a generation or two of scholars who continue to suffer underemployment and precarity. Such experiences yield deformations of their own: regret at wasted time; pain of a future foreclosed; bitterness that others have access to resources for reasons that seem arbitrary or unfair”

“A profession, he observed in “Cultural Capital,” is an ego-ideal, an inner image of oneself. There is perhaps nothing harder or less rewarding to historicize than a bruised ego”

“In “Professing Criticism,” Guillory concludes an essay titled “On the Permanent Crisis of Graduate Education” by pointing to the rise of venues that accommodate the kinds of criticism that the university cannot. “These are sites (for the most part) of intellectual exchange on the internet, new versions of ‘little magazines,’ such as n+1, or of journals such as The Point, as well as the now vast proliferation of blogs on cultural matters, some of which host high-level exchanges,” he writes”

“Here one catches a sudden glimpse of a future in which the Scholar-Critic kaleidoscopes into many hyphenated identities: the Critic-Copy Editor, the Critic-Community Organizer, the Critic-Assistant, the Critic-Amazon Warehouse Associate-Uber Driver. (I leave to one side the Critic of Independent Means and the Critic Who Married Into Money.)”

“This new kind of critic may write for one of the magazines that Guillory names. But there’s no reason to restrict ourselves to such venues. It is not unusual to stumble upon an essay on Goodreads or Substack that is just as perceptive as academic or journalistic essays, which, no matter how many rounds of revision they undergo, reflect the déformation professionnelle of their respective spheres”

“Early in “Professing Criticism,” Guillory writes that I. A. Richards regarded criticism “as a practice in which every reader of literature was engaged.” But a different proposition presents itself: If everybody is a critic, then no one is”

“The idea recalls Guillory’s ending to “Cultural Capital,” in which he walks his reader through a thought experiment that Karl Marx undertook in “The German Ideology.” Under the communist organization of society, Marx speculates, eliminating the division of labor will also eliminate the distinction that accrues to artists—writers, painters, sculptors, composers, actors, critics, and other producers of “unique labors.” The utopian horizon of aesthetic production is the disappearance of the painter, the writer, the actor, the composer, and the critic—or, rather, the disappearance of painting, writing, and so on as autonomous domains. In this world, there would be no professional critics, only people who engage in criticism as one activity among many”

“The result would be to liberate criticism from the institutions of the materially advantaged, allowing it to overflow into the activities of daily life”

“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”

“Literary criticism may have to be de-professionalized before its practitioners will allow themselves to openly embrace aesthetic judgment or to speak in the voice of the lay reader once more”

“There are various sites that present themselves as alternatives not only for writing but also for teaching: adult and continuing-education programs, community centers, bookstores, book festivals, teach-ins, even the social-media platforms of the Internet”