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

Περιλαμβάνει βιβλιογραφικές παραπομπές και ευρετήριο.

Part One: The Formation and Deformation of Literary Study -- Institution of Professions -- Professing Criticism -- Critique of Critical Criticism -- Part Two: Organizing Literature: Foundations, Antecedents, Consequences -- Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities -- The Postrhetorical Condition -- Two Failed Disciplines: Belles Lettres and Philology -- The Location of Literature -- The Contradictions of Global English -- Part Three: Professionalization and Its Discontents -- 9 On the Permanent Crisis of Graduate Education -- Evaluating Scholarship in the Humanities -- Composition and the Demand for Writing -- The Question of Lay Reading -- Conclusion: Ratio Studiorum.

"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 In a series of essays, several previously unpublished, Guillory unpacks what it means to "profess criticism."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"--