Illustration by Jandos Rothstein
Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study
By John Guillory
University of Chicago Press
Scholars in the humanities, increasingly under assault from right-wing politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, often defend their mission in grand terms. They say that their work provides essential insights into urgent questions about society and politics as well as literature and the arts. But might a modest conception of the humanities be a more effective and accurate defense? That is the case that John Guillory, a professor of English at NYU, tries to make in his new book, Professing Criticism.
The crisis of the humanities is not a new development. The liberal arts have been in intermittent decline ever since the late 19th century, when they ceded to the sciences their authority and raison d’ȇtre—the production of the knowledge most highly valued by society. Lately, the humanities have been in a fight for survival. Things look grim no matter where you look: dwindling state funds for liberal arts education; shrinking humanities faculties and enrollments; the cratering of prestige for the humanities in the culture at large; dispirited responses to vicious attacks on schools and libraries by the protofascist right. Just this week, Marymount University, a private Catholic university in Virginia, eliminated all of its liberal arts majors and dropped its M.A. program in English and humanities, which it justified, against faculty opposition, as required by its “responsibility to [its students] to prepare them for the fulfilling, in-demand careers of the future.”
Faced with this onslaught, the professoriate has, according to Guillory, resorted to inflated and futile claims for the value of literary study that are only likely to make things worse. Guillory’s project: explaining why these claims are excessive and doomed, and articulating what should replace them as the self-conception of literary study if it is to survive in a culture that is actively hostile or at best indifferent to it.
Professing Criticism is ambitious and impressively learned, an extraordinarily deep and illuminating immersion in the history and sociology of professionalism, European literature, and critical theory. The book is in some ways a sequel to Guillory’s equally magisterial Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), which anatomized how the educational system creates a “canon” of cultural artifacts worth studying and allocates status and social mobility on the basis of access to them. That book was published at the height of the “canon wars” over the demotion of “dead white men” from literature syllabi in favor of women, Black, global Anglophone, and other formerly ignored authors. In his introduction to Cultural Capital, Guillory disclaimed the project of writing a full institutional history of literary study, but he’s now written it, and it was well worth waiting for, even if his unsettling conclusions aren’t convincing.
The fall of the humanities, Guillory contends, was inherent in their professionalization, which in turn followed from the triumph of the scientific worldview. Professions by definition must have a delimited field of study and a set of skills, methods, customs, and rituals for studying that field and producing knowledge about it. They must have training and credentialing regimes, with their attendant bureaucracies, and they must use these to control the market for their expertise by erecting barriers to entry. And they must have specialized sites for disseminating their work.
Guillory’s retreat from politics underestimates the potential power of the humanities and forfeits a compelling justification for professing them.
Until the early 20th century, literary criticism in England and America was not a profession, and such great critics as Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Dickens, Eliot, Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and Twain weren’t professionals. They usually weren’t trained or based in universities and didn’t confine themselves to a single genre or field, publishing essays, reviews, biographies, histories, poems, and novels. They wrote largely for newspapers and large-circulation periodicals, not scholarly journals, and saw all of society as within the ambit of their thought.
As the sciences gained prestige, authority, and funding, the humanities struggled to keep up. When literary criticism moved into the professional realm of university English departments, it became just one discipline, and one specialized discourse, among many. It had no special purchase on creating knowledge that society valued. As the media have expanded, it has had no ready answer to the question of what exactly makes reading literature more valuable than going to the movies, listening to the radio, watching TV, or playing video games. Yet the profession has never given up its claims of being the foundation of education, the arbiter of what texts are worth studying, the validator of class status and social worth, the locus of trenchant political and social criticism and moral authority.
Guillory argues that these claims are so exaggerated that they have damaged the humanities. The ability to interpret a text and produce knowledge about it (who wrote it, when, under what circumstances, with what allusions and references, within what traditions or conventions, and so on) does not provide “a sufficient basis for the criticism of society.” It is a delusion to think that literary criticism is likely to effect social change. Criticism is not an “Archimedean lever for moving the world”; it can only be the production of knowledge about texts selected in an ongoing, rigorous process from a nearly infinite archive of textual objects ranging from purported high art to everyday mass culture. The teaching of literature is also not a unique, privileged site for teaching critical thinking, he asserts. Any scientific or humanistic discipline can do that; it’s part of what constitutes a discipline in the first place.
Guillory seems to be suggesting that when professors claim that literary criticism is a means of changing society, they hand the right a stick for beating themselves up. Conservatives often cling to an equally imaginary view of the humanities as the guardian and celebrant of real American values; the flip side of that belief is the fear that English professors and the books they assign in class will corrupt youth and weaken the nation. Both views, Guillory suggests, rest on the mistaken premise that the literary is the political and the syllabus a surrogate for society.
The best that professors of literature can do, Guillory concludes, like Robert Frost’s oven bird, is “singing not to sing … [knowing] what to make of a diminished thing.” They “can reasonably claim” to enhance the ability of their students “to understand literary works, to take pleasure in these works, and to comprehend how complex a literary artifact can be, how interconnected with its social environment, how much meaning can be condensed in how few words” and to “articulate [this] understanding for themselves.” In other words, like Candide, they can cultivate their gardens and teach others to cultivate theirs.
But Guillory’s retreat from politics goes too far. It underestimates the potential power of the humanities and forfeits a compelling justification for professing them. Guillory would dismiss me as another sentimental and pretentious critic of the sort he skewers, but there is no escape from the political implications of teaching. Enhancing students’ ability to understand literature changes what kind of people they are, enabling them to empathize, sympathize, and criticize through their imaginative engagement with the lives of others as represented in art. It creates different kinds of citizens. Reading a novel or performing a play can do that in a way that solving an equation, synthesizing a molecule, or writing code can’t. In Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm—a passionate and moving account of her students’ and her own experiences—Gayle Greene writes that the liberal arts are “skills a person needs to take part in the world,” and teaching them is not about developing human capital but about shaping human beings, “teach[ing] us what we are and what we may become.” This kind of critical thinking is what DeSantis and his ilk are afraid of, and why they demonize the humanities. Guillory is right that professing criticism in itself is not enough to move the world, but it is an invaluable means for creating that Archimedean lever he despairs of, the inquisitive and active citizen.
