Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory (review)

Reviewed by: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory Ritchie Robertson Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. By John Guillory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2022. xvi+ 407 pp. $29. ISBN 978–0–226–82130–6. In these loosely linked essays, John Guillory uses his deep familiarity with the history of scholarship, teaching, and rhetoric to view the modern university from 'a certain orbital distance' (p. 71). He begins with a sociologically informed account of how the teaching of English in American universities became, in the nineteenth century, an organized profession which issued its own credentials (the Ph.D.). Professionalization gave academics a degree of autonomy and social standing. Departments of English and modern languages inherited two traditions: that of belles-lettres (descending from Hugh Blair's occupancy of the Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh in 1762–83) and philology, imported from Germany. After long contests between scholars and critics, the two reached an accommodation in the mid-twentieth century. Their subject was understood as 'literary criticism', and their approaches could be reconciled in the person of the 'scholar-critic'. Some academics, however, felt a lack of purpose, and were impelled by the new social movements of the 1960s to politicize their courses in the hope of effecting social change. While such teaching has probably strengthened liberal attitudes among the college-educated, it has not changed the world, nor has it resolved a widespread uncertainty about the point of teaching literature. Guillory diagnoses a persistent tendency in literary studies to overestimate the potential impact of one's work and then be disappointed when such impact is not visible. To make matters worse, the role of literature in people's lives has diminished as that of other media, especially film, has increased: Guillory mentions this topic several times without exploring its implications. What should literary academics do? Guillory does not put forward an agenda for literary study, but he does his best to clarify what teachers of literature can and should do. The essay 'Monuments and Documents' starts from the continual need to justify the study of literature (and the humanities generally) by contrast especially with STEM subjects. Rather than making implausible claims for the social value of the humanities or exaggerating their power to teach critical thinking, we should be clear about what humanities departments actually study. Whereas the sciences are defined by their method, the humanities are defined by their object. Borrowing his terms from an essay by Erwin Panofsky, 'The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline' (1938), Guillory argues that the humanities study monuments surviving from the past in which we are interested for whatever reason, and study them by means of documents. Panofsky's example is a fifteenth-century German altarpiece for which a contract survives. But a document might acquire 'monumentality', and [End Page 600] vice versa: a palaeographer might be primarily interested in the contract and use the altarpiece to document its significance. While this approach can also apply to present-day literature, it acknowledges records of the past as the paradigmatic objects of literary study, a focus which is welcome when older literature has for very many students become unfamiliar and unattractive. In his closing chapter Guillory puts forward five rationales for the study of literature as a discipline, i.e. 'a rational procedure for establishing what can be known about an object' (p. 344). They include training in reading and writing, and the refinement of moral judgement, which needs to get beyond an intuitive sense of 'relatability' (this current cliché evidently irritates him). He affirms that the aims of literary study include aesthetic pleasure, but adds that such pleasure may not be immediately available: it requires effort and knowledge, and is 'the result of educated experience' (p. 378). This chapter does not set an agenda, but gives a realistic assessment of the purpose and the likely rewards of studying literature. Guillory addresses many more topics. Some are historical. He surveys the history of rhetoric, emphasizing the watershed represented by the displacement of Latin by the vernaculars in educated writing and by the replacement of oral performance by written examinations...