Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory (review)

Reviewed by: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory Alejandro Cathey-Cevallos Guillory, John. 2022. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. $105.00 hc. $29.00 sc. 456 pp. As with Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), with Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) John Guillory has produced a virtuoso display of what scholarship at its most honest, self-aware best can accomplish. This is a book that asks questions everyone working in English and the humanities more broadly should consider. Working from a methodological framework derived from the sociology of professions, Guillory produces a broad sketch of the history of the study of texts—"the oldest kind of organized study in Western History, excepting only rhetoric" (354)—to consider the establishment of the discipline of literary criticism in the United States during the 1920s and '30s, exploring the interrelations between two major historical developments. On the one hand, Guillory asks how criticism overcame earlier disciplinary formations to be institutionalized within the university at the time of the emergence of the modern system of disciplines; on the other, he asks how literary critics as a social group established their main practice—the professing of criticism—as a form of professional discourse. The problem, Guillory holds, lies in the order in which these events took place, inverting the usual sequence, "Literary study became a profession before it became a discipline" (7). [End Page 596] This inversion, Guillory argues, resulted in a good deal of the problems that afflict the discipline in its crestfallen present: namely, uncertainty over its object of study, questions about its relevance in society, and overcompensating bravado about its social role. The book tells the story of how the predecessors of literary criticism—from the millenarian aegis of rhetoric to the short-lived experiments with belles-lettres, philology, and literary history, as well as the theoretical models and methods literary criticism developed for the study of texts—have all played their part in shaping the current organization of literary study as a discourse of knowledge. Simultaneously, he shows how the unresolved tensions left in the wake of this chronology continue to trouble the discipline's understanding of itself, its objects of study, and its aims. From this argument, set in Part I, "radiate the semi-independent studies" (Guillory 2022, 10) on various aspects of the discipline that Guillory presents in Parts II and III and that aim to understand the simultaneous processes of professional formation and deformation he claims have marked literary criticism since its inception as a university discipline. The modern university institutionalizes these forms of knowledge, organizing them into discrete disciplines through the differentiation of its objects and methods, and regulates the practices of intellectual inquiry that legitimize the production of knowledge about these objects. Professing Criticism consists of a series of illuminating essays on these aspects of the historical development of English studies, on the humanities more broadly, and on the current state of the discipline. Guillory is both severe and honest in his assessment; the picture painted is bleak without needing to wax hyperbolic about the gravity of the situation nor grandstanding in ratifying the value of the humanities and of literary study in particular. Quite the contrary. Soberingly, Guillory seeks to provide more modest justifications for the study of texts than those that have resulted from the literary scholar's professional deformation: an overstatement of the aims and impact of literary criticism that justify it as an intrinsically radical political activity. For all the despair the book seems to have elicited, Guillory's final plea for hope is more forceful than its throat-clearing suggests. Instead of presenting a eulogy of the discipline, Guillory ultimately asks what form the discipline should take going forward, and what role the professional and scholarly practices that define literary criticism today ought to play within its future formation. Mostly contained in the final chapter, which consists of a [End Page 597] rousing argument about the rationales for the study of literature, the elegance of Guillory's suggestion for the discipline's future lies in its...