At a time when the English major obituary is fast becoming its own sub-genre, the ever-nuanced and clear-eyed John Guillory has published Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, an exhaustive and careful history of the institutional study of literature that contextualizes its roots from ancient Greece to the modern American multiversity. Guillory, an NYU English professor, received widespread acclaim for his 1993 book, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, a work that reframed the then-contentious narrative surrounding which texts should and should not be included in the English curriculum. 

While Professing Criticism arrives at a moment when many in the field of literary studies wonder whether there will be any curriculum left to fight over, Guillory makes the “Death of the English Major” dirges sung so often seem rather self-referential and anachronistic. It turns out that the study of literature can adapt to changing mediums and institutional venues rather resiliently, which makes sense because great literature of any sort will always be sought after as a refuge of enjoyment and contemplation. 

This assurance may be an empty one for those who wish to preserve the English department as the primary site for the professional study of literature. In Professing Criticism, Guillory reiterates and extends a central point he makes in Canon Formation: “The greatest problem for teachers of literature today is the fact that literature is no longer, as it once was, the principal source of entertainment for those able to read. Nor is it the principal means of achieving cultural distinction of the sort that once motivated the European bourgeoisie.” Whether the serious study of literature is maintained inside or outside of the academy, the scale will be smaller because the site of the practice of reading itself has largely been relegated to the rectangles in our pockets. Subsequently, the social benefits of reading literature extensively bring neither the aura of prestige nor a bridge to deeper communion with others. Enjoying a great literary work that no one else you know will read creates a strange mix of thrill and isolation.

Presumably, the social network of the English department temporarily helps solve this problem, but the curriculum has become so amorphous that students no longer know what exactly an English department does, as the obituaries linked above make clear. This point should not be dismissed too easily as a problem to be settled simply by a more clear articulation of our purpose, as if the English department merely has a PR problem. With only the remnants of a canon intact, the English department faces a network of existential questions that arise from the fact that 1) a high percentage of Americans can pick up a literary work they like (usually, a novel) and read it with some level of ability and 2) it is no longer clear what advantage the ability to read literature well means for one’s livelihood. The perceived inaccessibility of some subjects seems to require a faculty to teach the content (physics, computer science, statistics), or the subjects themselves lead to identifiable career paths (business, law, communications). Comparatively, an English faculty member can seem like an extravagance, a potentially unnecessary guide to an enjoyable but profitless destination.

English departments have expanded our objects of study, but this has not attracted many new students. From the perspective of the public, neither film nor the popular novel demands a teacher. The study of poetry is often judged as being unnecessarily difficult when the payout is so meager, and a brief survey of greeting cards and maid-of-honor speeches suggests that a nursery-rhyme level of competency is sufficient for the average American to pass with respect. The abandonment of form in poetics has reinforced rather than mitigated this dynamic. Finally, the study of non-fiction essays is something the English department shares with nearly every other subject, and “creative non-fiction”—the newest literary genre—is already what everyone is reading on their phones. What keeps the English departments afloat is freshman composition, but this somewhat arranged marriage is being undone by the Rhetoric-Composition degree that formally prepares its students to teach writing, which is not exactly the pedagogical foundation of literary studies.

With large-scale success within the current academic institution a mere fantasy at this point, the field of English literature is at a proper moment for reflection. What is distinctive about the English department? Do we teach students how to read in some particular manner that they would scarcely be able to acquire on their own? Is the study of literature concerned primarily with exposure to a diverse set of literary voices and genres, and, if so, to what end? Is it for identity formation and activism? Again, if so, why is the study of literature the best means to that end? Or do we actually specialize in teaching certain interpretive frameworks that are shared across the field? Or should we embrace the “philosophy” descriptor that ominously modifies our degree and claim that we are seekers of truth that use the somewhat oblique but at times very potent guide of literary texts to guide us? The last sentence sounds idealistic, but it has the potential advantage of reconnecting the study of literature with history, theology, philosophy, and similar fields that share our contemporary plight but also our traditional significance.

Paradoxically, the recent fall of the English department may be rooted in the surprising popularity it reached by throwing in its lot with the fields of political science, sociology, and psychology. Guillory traces the anomalous institutional success of the English major from the 1960s until a decade ago that may not have been predicated on the study of literature itself but on the study of political culture with literature as a central but not dominant object of study. It is worth noting that close analysis of English major enrollment patterns suggests persistent instability, even during these halcyon days, with upticks that correlate with ideologically leftist responses to power advances in national politics on the right. In the humanities, it turns out that Nixon, Reagan, and the Bush family were pretty good for business! 

What is behind this correlation is likely the immersion of “cultural theory”—a sort of pseudo-philosophy branching out from theoretical linguists, experimental psychologists, and neo-Marxist sociologists—as a central field within English departments. For many decades, “theory” was the primary interpretive frame used to read texts, and it was in some ways the distinctive element of becoming an English major that is now missing. Guillory carefully traces how this development led English literature scholars to purport to produce not merely criticism of literature but “criticism of society” itself. These rather grandiose claims have been and remain attractive to many activist-minded 18-year-olds, but they have been met with some suspicion and now even bemusement by other fields. 

With humility, Guillory observes that literary criticism “in the disciplinary system by no means confers upon literary scholars the authority to speak on social and public matters in public venues,” but he then quickly adds that “criticism is the privilege of no one discipline and the obligation of all.” Of course, the presumptions of criticism create easy routes to public prophecy, and researchers in other departments are not immune to believing that their scholarship can critique comprehensively and solve rather simplistically massive social ills. Many departments now invoke such rhetoric when advertising their majors to students, substantiating these claims with “objective” data that carries greater social cache. Here the “subjective” and increasingly irrelevant humanities disciplines have lost—lost in a game they designed.

A key question that needs to be asked is why leftist cultural theory became the assumed lens through which students were expected to read and understand great literature, which often transcends political alignments. Guillory fastidiously outlines how that development occurred, and he rightly points out that “the emergence of theory remains indissolubly linked to the discipline of literary criticism, and thus to the literary curriculum. Theory is last, if not first, literary theory.” This claim is technically correct but should strike us as rather strange, primarily because very little “theory” directly concerns literature. Literary theory is an institutional chimera nurtured exclusively within the English department. Guillory believes that this union occurs because cultural theory articulates an apology for the “marginalized,” which is where English departments find themselves within the multiversity; it conversely explains why “there are few Marxist economists in economics departments, just as there are few neoliberal apologists in literature departments.” This too-easy rationalization brings up some obvious chicken-and-egg questions. It must be asked why literature departments continued to teach perfectly viable theories of psychology, biology, and economics that until very recently were widely rejected by scholars in those fields.

Guillory seems too distracted by the rapid dissolution of the contemporary English department to address the most stunning outcome of the theory-literature cross-pollination that prophecies on behalf of all society: it succeeded! The novel ideas about gender that run rampant today did not originate in biology departments; Marxist financial concepts were not espoused by business schools; and the Freudian constructions of the mind were not taught in accredited psychiatric clinics. These ideas were all postulated by “theorists” and defiantly preserved by literature scholars. What is now being harvested from the marginalized soil of the field of English is an entirely novel and radical anthropology of the human person that germinates its ideological seeds throughout all disciplinary fields. Even the hard sciences recalibrate their fundamental understanding of the human person and produce research to verify their alignment. 

Students inspired by these ideas somewhat perceptively ask why literature would be a necessary corollary to this education when they can receive a more marketable and data-supported version in the social and political sciences or in increasingly-theorized communications and education departments. They should still thank their neighborhood English department for obstinately clutching to the roots of cultural theory for decades before its seeds finally started to grow elsewhere.

Guillory is an old-world economic socialist who clearly wants English departments to desert the circus animals of socio-cultural prophecy and “to return to literature, to be content with that object” in the rag-and-bone shop of the classroom. In that project, he is suspicious of efforts to apply postcolonial and critical race principles in an effort to “decolonize the curriculum.” He patiently and charitably dismantles arguments that identity-based representation should dictate the syllabus, which he incisively notes “are most likely to be reflected in the genre of ‘young adult fiction.’” 

Guillory’s extensive narrative empowers him to make disarmingly simple and accurate conjectures: “Even if this problem of representation were solvable, it would still be doubtful that the desire of our students to see themselves in what we ask them to read would be gratified.” He is quick to identify insincere presentations of alternative positions: “One ironic consequence of this process is that Western ‘high culture’ has become the low-hanging fruit for the decolonial project. Figures who are no longer much read, who have already suffered from cultural divestment, have been roused from their dormancy to serve as representatives of Western culture, the face of imperial domination.” Guillory thinks that accusations leveled against the authors, works, and ideas of Western culture writ large must be handled on a case-by-case basis, and only those with the intellectual acumen and necessary stamina to educate themselves properly should lead such discussions. Guillory makes ideologues of all stripes who participate in the rancorous debates over the value and flaws of Western culture sound like inflated tabloid journalists rather than true scholars.

In order to stabilize English departments trying to survive these ever-shifting culture wars, Guillory proposes a two-track major, one that focuses on the works of “English and American literature” and the other on post-World War II anglophone literature “with an orientation towards issues of social identity.” He thinks departmental civil war might be prevented because, while the “identity thematic dominates the study of contemporary literature,” that feature changes “as literature recedes into the past” and “the familiar categories of identity become attenuated” and “anachronistic.” While the best work of literary scholarship still attests to this reality, an increasingly progressive wider professoriate and student body will likely have little patience for such nuance. Guillory anticipates the assertion that the first track will be viewed as “supposedly nationalist and imperialist” while the second is “transnational and postcolonial” by insisting that such an “allegorization of the curriculum” cannot “survive historical inspection.” Again, Guillory believes in rational discussion supported by thorough research because he so skillfully produces that kind of work. But one would not be too much of a cynic to be less optimistic about the possibility of these two proposed tracks co-existing in an English department. 

As the job market has shrunk and English departments necessarily contract by attrition, an already progressive faculty is likely to continue to radicalize, especially as salaries in the humanities suffer relative to inflation and to that offered by other departments. It is conceptually preposterous that such a contingent is going to hire an entire cohort of traditional English and American scholars for the sake of historical representation or ideological diversity. Neither political, religious, nor gender diversity are perceived as legitimate diversity categories within the academy for reasons that either will not or cannot be articulated. 

As Jonathan Haidt and others have demonstrated, the reduplication of identity categories in the academy is very real, and the English department represents an especially concentrated version of that dynamic. Ideological cloning begins at the graduate school level, and Guillory worries about the closed “feedback loop between the faculty and graduate students,” which “tends to accelerate the turnover of movements and tendencies in the discipline, submitting scholarship to the demands of fashion.” These gradations now cycle almost exclusively within the theoretical categories of race and gender in the contemporary English department, and only outside intervention would seem capable of interrupting that paradigm.

The anemic scarcity of English tenure-track positions tends to mean that only the most ideologically committed are willing to sacrifice years of income for the chance to participate in what Guillory describes as a “lottery, in which only a fraction of those who buy the ticket will win the prize.” The radical endurance of hope in these students against all statistical logic baffles Guillory, who apparently has not spent much time in youth sports where 5-foot-8 fathers of 10-year-olds sincerely believe their children are on the way to the NBA simply because they shell out thousands each year for traveling teams. Of course, there are differences. “[I]nside hiring committees, faculty members try to penetrate the illusory equality of candidates, their seemingly uniform excellence,” but there is nothing arbitrary about Giannis Antetokounmpo dunking on your child’s head. 

Unlike in the NBA, it can be very difficult to rank talent in the academy, so hiring committees instinctively choose candidates with beliefs and values that align with their own. For those excellent PhDs not chosen, there is the specter of teaching six adjunct sections per semester at three different universities in a given metro area while living out of a car and sifting the dumpster behind Panera at night for supper. This narrative is roundly subverted by Guillory, who notes that no less than 96% of English PhDs who do not find a position in the academy end up in “professional and managerial jobs” with salaries that often outpace those available in tenure lines. 

The crisis of adjunct professors is real, but it might be better to view these positions as short-term stints that offer those willing to take the risk an outside chance at re-entering the academy. Unless independent means are available, contingent positions should be abandoned after no more than three years. Graduate school in the humanities itself looks more and more like an endeavor of intellectual luxury for those who can afford to take a few years to study intensely for low pay with the hope that the cumulative experience will contribute not only to a future career—likely outside of the academy—but also to the enjoyable development of the person. If the process instead engenders a volatile mix of disenchantment and rage in its participants, that effect may say more about the ideas cultivated in the program than the structure or content of the discipline itself.

Those who do win one of the academy’s Golden Tickets often end up swimming in a river of administratively-processed chocolate, and sometimes the only way out is to enter the bureaucratic pipeline itself. A handful of scholars become R1 professors with access to university libraries, substantial research funding, 1-1 courseloads, and a community of scholars ready to review and inspire further research. The “Acknowledgements” section of high-level monographs never ceases to astound me, with its effusive gratitude for fellow scholars in the field, often working in the same or adjacent departments; friends and guides at international research libraries; institutional and national grant providers; and regular and extended sabbaticals. 

The most prominent scholars (like Guillory) in these positions are not simply fortunate lottery winners but truly exceptional minds with rare talent whose quality and quantity of scholarship would not be matched by most PhDs even if they were offered the same vocational benefits. Even the NBA has players who rarely come off the bench, and Giannis can dunk on their heads, too. Most tenure-track lines in English come with relatively low pay, high course loads, substantial administrative responsibilities, and minimal research access or funding. Expectations for scholarship are typically low in such positions, and mercifully so. These posts can still be very rewarding since they allow scholars to teach absorbing content to a fascinating array of students, shape departments and the university with intelligent and hard-working colleagues, and intermittently engage in meaningful research. There are far worse fates. 

At research institutions, Guillory contends that traditional scholarship has been “overvalued,” which has led tenure and promotion committees to value speed and quantity of production over quality and depth. It has also led even the best scholarship to be “undervalued” outside of the academy, which is likely a severe understatement even within the academy. With its current scholarship largely ignored, its student population dwindling, and its favorite ideas now seeded elsewhere, the precarious future of the English department troubles Guillory. It seems poised to seek an ever more distant ideological frontier. 

But Guillory still values its intellectual and cultural history and potential, and he argues that it is the proper refuge of “professional reading,” which he outlines as a rigorous disciplinary work that requires communal participation. He contrasts this labor with “lay reading,” which he describes as a pleasure-seeking and mostly solitary leisure activity. And his distinction demarcates not only how reading occurs but what is read and studied. Redefining the English department as a home for “professional readers” would be a welcome conceptual move for many, though it may be too late to reclaim that once-prestigious role. One thing is clear from Guillory’s brilliantly comprehensive historical synopsis of the field: the study of serious literary texts will arise in some form, even as its current iteration weathers an ecological dust bowl.