When considering the work of the gray eminences who presided over the decline of literary studies, we should reverse the famous judgment about Harry Truman. While they got some small things right, they got all the big things wrong.1 John Guillory's new book Professing Criticism holds a special interest by serving as a kind of summation and epitaph for the work of his generation of literary scholars. Guillory argues that the sacrifice of criticism's social aims was necessary for its formation as a rigorous discipline. But in fact the book demonstrates through its own errors and omissions that the field's abandonment of its social purpose entailed the compromise of its intellectual standards.
Guillory's story about the advent of literary studies as an academic discipline begins with a brief account of journalistic literary criticism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These critics addressed large publics and attempted to cultivate...
