Guillory’s Agon: Et in Academia Ego

Abstract

Toward the end of his preface John Guillory writes of the first three sections of his book, “This is the bad news” (xv). But “good” news, he says, is offered in its conclusion. The bad news, an analysis of the inherent deformation of English studies, takes up over 340 pages: the good news, a rationale of the subject, something over 40. So this scholarly and important book is on one reading a work of mourning. It is one of the most brilliant recent accounts of our subject, imbued withmelancholia though it is. And true to the conventions of the classical elegy, there is a putative upturn at the end of the work: the author twitches hismantle blue,moves to pastures new, and offers five ways in which the subject can become a serious discipline, though even here he envisages its extinction. The book has been greeted in a number of ways, from the respect of Jessica Swoboda to the slight nervousness of Merve Emre to Bruce Robbins’s cheerfully robust refutation of nonalignment. The gravitas of the book is real, however, its sense of loss deep, its analysis challenging. No one can doubt that our subject is in serious difficulties, at least, no one in England who has seen departments summarily closed. And I write from an English perspective. (Possibly the subtitle of Professing Criticism should have been Essays on the Organization of Literary Study in the USA.) In Culture