On the critic and the professoriat - Merve Emre in The New Yorker:

‘The figure’s shape-shifting in the centuries since is the subject of 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. (Full disclosure: I have written an introduction to a forthcoming thirtieth-anniversary edition of the book.)’

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‘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. Any claim about what should be taught had to be seen in light of the academy’s institutional role. Whether one spoke of the Western canon (as Bloom did), the feminist canon (as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar did), or the African American canon (as Henry Louis Gates did), the idea of a literary canon was a form of cultural capital.’

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‘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.’

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‘As a result, literary study has contracted. State legislatures have slashed funding for the arts and humanities; administrators have merged or shut down departments; and the number of tenure-track jobs for graduate students has dwindled. Since the nineteen-sixties, the proportion of students pursuing degrees in English has dropped by more than half.
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. These crises have a troubling and obscure relation to each other. It is not clear that even the most robust justifications for literary study would be effective in the face of overwhelming socioeconomic pressures, the rise of new media, and the decline of prose fiction as a genre of entertainment. Whatever the case may be, the hard truth is that no reader needs literary works interpreted for her, certainly not in the professionalized language of the literary scholar. Soon, Guillory writes, the knowledge and pleasure transmitted by literary criticism in the university may become “a luxury that can no longer be afforded.” When that future bears down on us—and, barring a miracle or a revolution, it is a matter of when, not if—how will we justify the practice of criticism?’

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‘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.”’

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‘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. For her, the proper task of criticism was to participate in social transformations occurring outside the university. The battle against exploitation, she claimed, could be waged by writing about racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism, using an increasingly refined language of historical context, identity, and power. Literary artifacts (poems, novels, and other playthings of the élite) could be replaced as objects of study by pop-culture ones (Taylor Swift, selfies, and other playthings of the masses). By 2004, it was possible for Edward Said to lament that there were only two paths available to the critic in an era of intense specialization. He could “either become a technocratic deconstructionist, discourse analyst, new historicist, and so on, or retreat into a nostalgic celebration of some past state of glory associated with what is sentimentally evoked as humanism.” In 2023, we would consider him extremely lucky to find employment in the professoriat whichever path he chose.’

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‘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. On some level, he knows that this “form of political surrogacy,” as Guillory provocatively describes it, is not enough to achieve the cultural centrality that great critics of the nineteenth century enjoyed. But that does not stop him from grasping for it. “The overweening self-regard of the scholar is the behavioral correlative of an overestimation of the aim of scholarship, which is in turn an attempt to cope with radical uncertainty about this aim,” Guillory writes. “If only it were enough to say, with Aristotle, that the desire to know is all the reason of the scholar’s labors!”’

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‘Scholars, instead of chasing relevance via a politics of surrogacy, might gain from embracing the marginality of literary study. Doing so could free criticism’s practitioners to play to their hidden strengths: their ability to pronounce with intensity and determination on the beauties and defects of writing; their capacity to think about language with absorption and intelligence; their mingled love of art, craft, erudition, connection, and sensuousness. Who knows what consequences this might have on the attractiveness of the discipline to undecided undergraduates or interested lay readers?’

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‘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.
Ultimately, however, it may not be in the U.S. or the U.K., or even in the English language, that the future dramas of criticism will unfold. It is easy to believe, with the blind confidence of provincial and protected people, that the profession begins and ends on either side of the Atlantic, with your Yale College or your Harvard, your Oxford or your Cambridge. But there is a wide world that stretches beyond the institutions of the Anglosphere, and there are governments that, for one reason or another, remain more interested in helping the arts and humanities to flourish as part of the larger human endeavor.’

Read the article here.

There is a world to be discovered outside the world outside the English language, but many of the problems and delusions will remain the same.

The cost of autonomy is influence. The humanities are dying in the hands of specialists who write for four other specialists. That’s the academia. But outside the academia literary criticism faces the same problem.

Credentialism is just one of many enemies. Yes and the critic is too often out of many hidden strengths, unfortunately. Two editors of the book section of their respective newspaper told me recently that they want less reviews in their papers and more essays.

A bit more of hidden strengths I guess.

What good is cultural capital if only five people accept the currency?