The New Yorker · by Merve Emre · January 16, 2023
Of the character sketches that the English satirist Samuel Butler wrote in the mid-seventeenth century—among them “A Degenerate Noble,” “A Huffing Courtier,” “A Small Poet,” and “A Romance Writer”—the most recognizable today is “A Modern Critic.” He is a contemptible creature: a tyrant, a pedant, a crackpot, and a snob; “a very ungentle Reader”; “a Corrector of the Press gratis”; “a Committee-Man in the Commonwealth of letters”; “a Mountebank, that is always quacking of the infirm and diseased Parts of Books.” He judges, and, if authors are to be believed, he judges poorly. He praises without discernment. He invents faults when he cannot find any. Beholden to no authority, obeying nothing but the mysterious stirrings of his heart and his mind, he hands out dunce caps and placards insolently and with more than a little glee. Authors may complain to their friends, but they have no recourse. The critic’s word is law.
Butler’s sketch would still strike a chord with aggrieved writers today, but, in his time, the Modern Critic—part mountebank, part magician—was a new phenomenon. 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.)
“Cultural Capital” emerged when literature departments were in the throes of the “canon wars.” These were curricular skirmishes fought between progressives, who wanted to “open the canon” to work by authors from marginalized groups, and conservatives, who feared that identity politics was being elevated over aesthetic value. 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. 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.
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. The book’s chapters take us on a strange journey, across a landscape haunted by ghosts: the bygone disciplines of philology, rhetoric, and belles-lettres; the half-glimpsed figures of the New Critics and the New York intellectuals; strident culture warriors past and present. Guillory chronicles it all with a certain Olympian detachment, a special acuity of vision that brings history into focus with painful clarity.
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.
At the same time, the shifting economic order has made the cultural capital of literature less valuable in market terms. 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. (Writing the previous sentence, I was startled to recall, for the first time in years, the lyrics of the song “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?,” from the Broadway musical “Avenue Q”: “Four years of college and plenty of knowledge / Have earned me this useless degree. / I can’t pay the bills yet, / ’Cause I have no skills yet.”) 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?
“Professing Criticism” proceeds on the basis that, in order to decipher the present and to prepare for the future, one must first turn to the past. “The study of literature—in the premodern sense of any writing that has been preserved or valued—is very old, the oldest kind of organized study in Western history, excepting only rhetoric,” Guillory writes. But 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.” Emendation and explanation required the kind of intimate linguistic and historical knowledge that could be acquired only through extensive schooling. Inquiry, however, lay “open for every willing Undertaker,” Theobald wrote, “and I shall be pleas’d to see it the Employment of a masterly Pen.”
By the eighteenth century, there were more masterly pens at work in the burgeoning public sphere. In schools, a vernacular curriculum for the emergent middle and commercial classes had started to compete with the classical curriculum, the birthright of the aristocracy. Criticism flourished in clattery coffeehouses and debating societies, and in the raucous columns of ephemera such as pamphlets, periodicals, chapbooks, and daily newspapers. “THE NEWS-PAPERS!” shouts the dramatist Sir Fretful Plagiary to the theatre critics Dangle and Sneer, in Richard Sheridan’s 1779 play, “The Critic.” “Sir, they are the most villainous—licentious—abominable—infernal—Not that I ever read them—No—I make it a rule never to look into a news-paper.” No matter: Dangle and Sneer take it upon themselves to relay to Sir Fretful a vicious review of his recent play, to which he responds in the only way an author attempting to save face can: “Ha! ha! ha!—very good!” But, as Dangle’s wife reminds her petty husband, the artist may have the last laugh. “Both managers and authors of the least merit, laugh at your pretensions,” she tells him. “The PUBLIC is their CRITIC—without whose fair approbation they know no play can rest on the stage, and with whose applause they welcome such attacks as yours.”
Mrs. Dangle’s argument would have seemed less persuasive even a few decades later, when the critic and the public became more intimately entangled. As literacy rates rose and the cost of producing and consuming print declined, the circulation of criticism increased. The hundred years on either side of “The Critic” marked, for Virginia Woolf, the ascendancy of “the great critic—the Dryden, the Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold.” 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, who peers out at us from the austere faces of John Crowe Ransom and R. P. Blackmur, or, in the U.K., of F. R. and Q. D. Leavis. 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.
Establishing a formal method of critical inquiry was in part an attempt to put literary studies on a par with the sciences, which were the chief models for the development of the professions in the university. 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. 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.
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. A professional is not unlike a racehorse that has worn blinders long enough to have grown numb to the feel of them.
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.
One can see the scholar—his hump and his paunch, his apathetic frame, his sharp, sagging elbows. His physical stigmata find their corollaries in his strange habits of mind and heart. 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. 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!”
One suspects that Guillory is not delighted by the state of his profession, but he is careful to avoid hand-wringing or boisterous calls to action. (He would likely see such a cri de coeur as a symptom of the illness rather than as a viable prescription.) Nonetheless, “Professing Criticism” does offer those of us in the academy an opportunity to reform our deformed selves—or, more modestly, perhaps, to rethink the justifications we offer for teaching and writing about literature. 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?
Admittedly, this all risks sounding sentimental, as Said warned. But, in a soaring coda to “Professing Criticism,” Guillory lays out five unsentimental rationales for literary study in the present and the future based on the long history of the functions that it has fulfilled. The first rationale, “linguistic/cognitive,” sees criticism as a forum for highly cultivated practices of listening, speaking, reading, and writing that serve as the deepest foundations for the development of thought. The second, “moral/judicial,” raises questions of ethical instruction as they relate to representation and interpretation; for instance, can a distasteful thought expressed by the narrator of a novel also be attributed to its author? This rationale is most prominent in lay reading, and although academics often deplore the tendency of lay reading to degrade into the labelling of characters as good or bad, likable or unlikable, it is also the covert justification for political critique, Guillory writes, “where works of literature are judged as moral agents themselves, collusive or resistant as the case may be.”
The third rationale, “national/cultural,” stems from the way that, starting in the early modern era, the emerging concept of national identity was intertwined with a new appreciation for vernacular literature, which had previously carried less prestige than Latin and ancient Greek. The fourth rationale, “aesthetic/critical,” is the one that Guillory places at the point of schism between the world of reviewing and the literary professoriat, which could never figure out how to teach or credential aesthetic judgment. It is here that Guillory makes his boldest, most openly prescriptive claim. “Our discipline is, or should be, committed to developing the capacity to judge among readers of literature. It has been too easy for the discipline to relegate judgment to the unspoken, or even to disparage it as just a ruse of ideology,” he writes. “More than ever, the uncertainty of aesthetic pleasure in literature calls for a sophisticated theory of cultural transmission in all of its sites, but above all in the classroom, where all the ladders of the discipline find their start.” By the time we get to the fifth and final rationale, “epistemic/disciplinary,” one wants badly to climb back down the ladder.
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. “To be a freelance scholar, no matter the quality of one’s scholarship, is precisely to be excluded from the system of rewards,” Guillory argues. 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. “Such sites disclose the widespread desire for an engagement with literature and culture that is more serious than the habits of mass consumption and that demands new genres and forms of discourse.” He does not develop the point further. Yet one suspects, given what such magazines and blogs can afford to pay, that any prospective contributor will have to hold a job, or several. 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. Nor should we limit the domain of criticism to writing. Anyone who has taught students knows that the best critiques are often produced in the classroom, through conversations in which one is trying to demonstrate how a poem or a novel works to many different readers, few of whom aspire to write or to join the professoriat.
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.
“Cultural producers would still compete to have their products read, studied, looked at, heard, lived in, sung, worn, and would still accumulate cultural capital in the form of ‘prestige’ or fame,” Guillory writes. But it would not matter whether you published criticism in the form of a Goodreads review or a magazine article; whether criticism was transmitted through the written word or the spoken one, in the form of podcasts or public lectures; whether the object of criticism was a novel, a film, a show, a song, a dance, a painting, a dress. All that would matter would be the logic of the critic’s thought, the pleasure of her style, the persuasiveness of her judgments, and the education imparted through her words. 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.
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. To sit alongside Guillory on his high perch, or maybe a branch or two higher, is not to dream of the past or to mourn the present. It is to scan new horizons for the second coming of the critic. ♦
