A Profession!

PROFESSIONS; LITERARY criticism; PRESS criticism

Until the canon wars could be reconceived as a question of widening access to cultural goods per se, Guillory argued, the debate - as well as the larger profession of academic criticism - would be doomed merely to repeat the theme of the unequal distribution of cultural capital. What, Guillory asks, were the historical forces over the centuries that produced, out of a welter of disciplinary arrangements - rhetoric, belles lettres, philology - a fairly recent phenomenon, the academic profession of literary criticism? In Guillory's careful outlining of this history, literary studies - or what was long known as "English" - became first an academic department and then a profession that was turned inward to the institution of the college and outward to a self-regulating cadre of credentialed experts. COLUMNS THE SCENE: A GRADUATE SEMINAR IN LITERATURE SOME-time in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two directions - either the long-promised wave of retirements and a deluge of open positions, or a decisive sign that the hiring trend line was never going to reverse its downward course. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Nation is the property of Nation Company, L. P. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)