“The notion of crisis and that of criticism are very closely linked,” declared Paul de Man in December 1966, in a lecture at the University of Texas, “so much so that one could state that all true criticism occurs in the mode of crisis.” For criticism, de Man explained, throws the very “act of writing into question.” It compels language to “reflect . . . on its own origin.” As a native of Austin, I savor this picture: the bleeding-edge Belgian deconstructionist onstage, holding forth to a stumped crowd of bow-tied Southern literature professors in what was then a sleepy college town, cattle still grazing a few miles from the State Capitol. Meanwhile, American universities were fat with federal funding, rising enrollments, and cold war research largesse. Crisis? Where?
Maybe de Man sensed his own incongruity. “Speaking of a crisis in criticism in the United States today, one is likely to appear,” he coyly noted, “out of tone.” But de Man pressed his case. “The experience of crisis,” he said, brings with it a “pattern of self-mystification.” From the formalists in midcentury English departments to the structuralists then ascendant in France, critics recognized slippery disparities between “sign and meaning,” but were unable or unwilling to turn this “insight” back upon their own languages of interpretation. Instead, they searched in vain for a universally valid method of reading. “All of us know this,” de Man offered, generously, but “we know it in the misleading way of a wishful assertion of the opposite.”
De Man also knew a thing or two about mystification. Decades later, he would be posthumously revealed as a career liar and swindler and a wartime hired pen for Belgian fascism. (For a while he also secretly had two wives.) But in this case, his practitioner’s eye for deceit caught something true: literary criticism needs crisis, feeds on it, even as we let it mislead us. A century ago, when the study of English literature had barely entered the academy, I. A. Richards was already deploring what he called “the chaos of critical theories.” Further invocations of crisis and upheaval have attended every moment in the discipline’s history. Academic literary criticism was indicted from within as not professional enough (John Crowe Ransom, 1938), or too professional (Randall Jarrell, 1952); too fixated on form (Geoffrey Hartman, 1966), or not formalist enough (George Levine, 1994); poorly historicized (Stephen Greenblatt, 1982), or overly historicized (Joseph North, 2017). “Criticism has always been in crisis,” Andrea Long Chu has written recently, citing a further 250-year span of examples, from Samuel Johnson to Cynthia Ozick. But nowhere in the “perpetual cycle of amnesia and epiphany,” Chu says, have critics paused “to ask whether the purported crisis is real.” It was ever thus.
Or was it? The latest crisis in literary studies feels different: more spiteful and less fertile, more terminally gloomy, a scene of death throes rather than birth pangs. It can seem that literature professors agree on little beyond a sense that something is irreversibly wrong. At the same time, some populations are more prone to crisis talk than others, as the pale, mostly male composition of the list above shows. When a tenured white scholar reaches un certain âge, he looks around and feels an urge toward disciplinary diagnosis. The 2020s have so far brought a tetralogy of such major interventions: Bruce Robbins’s Criticism and Politics, Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth, and John Guillory’s Professing Criticism and its short sequel, On Close Reading. (In the background is the young fogey North, who in 2017 published his seigneurial Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History at the tender age of 37.) However unalike in temperament and outlook, these men are united in not letting the current crisis go to waste.
Hardly in harmony on every point, their books nevertheless balance one another. Kramnick, a scholar of 18th-century British literature, brings a beaded specificity to bear on interpretive method that the others don’t attempt. Guillory, who has been the discipline’s preeminent diagnostician for three decades, insists on densely textured histories over hazy periodizations. Robbins, an old-school, big-tent Marxist, claims political potentials that his contemporaries tend to leave buried. Together they draw a picture of a field engaged — or mired — in an almost Cartesian probing of first principles: What do literary critics know, and how do they know it? Each starts, as well, from the premise that criticism’s local crisis of purpose is enveloped by a general crisis of university life. “It cannot be taken for granted that the institution of criticism will continue to exist,” Robbins writes, setting the tone. Even seen from the securest heights, the collapse of academic employment and the endangerment of the humanities appear omnipresent and unignorable.
Among literary academics, this turn inward comes after a long, bitter phase of turning on each other. Whether as peacekeepers or belligerents, these books enter the desultory closing skirmishes of what have been called the method wars. Wars is a bathetic word for a fifteen-year trickle of articles and counter-articles in paywalled journals, some subsequently spun into books, and all exchanged — lately, one senses, with waning enthusiasm — among a factious cohort of Medicare-eligible scholars. (A younger critic, David Kurnick, has called the conflict “our method melodramas,” though this sounds a little too fun.) In contention is the practice and future of critique. In the hands of Marx or Kant, this once proud term described the excavation of the inner logic of an idea or text, both to reveal its flaws and open up its uses; in the French tradition inherited by de Man, critique named the performance of literary judgment, in close dialogue with its object. Since then, the word has passed through a scrambled rhetorical chain to become a byword for everything allegedly wrong with literary studies.
The latest crisis in literary studies feels different: more spiteful and less fertile, more terminally gloomy, a scene of death throes rather than birth pangs.
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The opening shot was a 2004 essay by the late Bruno Latour, who asked, more in bemusement than anger, why critique had “run out of steam.” In Latour’s telling, since deconstruction’s rise in the 1970s, academic critics had become trapped in a posture of hermeneutic suspicion toward their texts, which they read with — as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it around the same time — “paranoid” authority. They excelled at exposing political occlusions and upturning ideological sediment, but in the process had sucked air, life, and curiosity from their work. They could smoke out the regimes of colonial resource extraction underlying the country-house contretemps in a Jane Austen novel, say, but they couldn’t tell you why people love Pride and Prejudice. Moreover, critique had made no dent in the oppressive hierarchies it aspired to confront: imperial war, climate change, and financial crisis advanced unabated. The new millennium saw a restless wish for a new hermeneutic strategy, one more generous to its texts, more inviting to novices, and more open to the world.
No one has answered this call more ambitiously than Rita Felski. A noted feminist literary theorist at the University of Virginia, Felski has embarked on a mid-career second act as the leading advocate of a new orientation in literary studies that she and others call postcritique. Where the paranoiac norm “look[s] behind the text” in search of “hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives,” Felski proposes that we instead “place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible,” in ourselves and others. If critique surgically dissects, “postcritical reading” aims to resuture the “coconstitution of texts and readers.” Instead of forcing our texts onto the operating table or the analyst’s couch, we might meet them as friends. It was a tantalizing promise: We could solve the crisis simply by bowing out of it.
Other scholars, Robbins most vocal among them, see in postcritique less criticism’s final transcendence than its virtual self-abolition. After all, a reading practice that checks “causes,” “conditions,” and “motives” at the door is left with — what, exactly? While labeled an “introduction,” Robbins’s Criticism and Politics reads more as a reaction, an explicit rebuke to the Felskian project and a brusque defense of exactly those kulturkritisch commitments postcritique waved away: ideological scrutiny, social siting, political side-taking. His 2017 demolition in PMLA retains its cruel accuracy: a fully achieved postcritique, Robbins writes, would bring “criticism . . . closer to fandom,” to a “rhetoric of helpful and largely positive advice to the would-be consumer.”
Casual readers of academic criticism — not a growth demographic — could well have missed out on all of this. The distended timelines of academic publishing, with its slow carousel of peer review, revision, and further review, give the printed record of these debates an inertial, afterimage effect; stale concepts and stillborn manifestos can pass as going concerns. (Even today, articles appear that cite another postcritique-adjacent salvo, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s “Surface Reading,” as if it dropped last week, instead of sixteen years ago.1 ) In past decades, intrascholarly hostilities over “theory” or canonicity spilled into the mainstream, as with the media frenzy over Allan Bloom’s proto-antiwoke 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, or Alan Sokal’s prank on the high-theory journal Social Text in 1996. These were mostly idle outrages, to which present assaults on curricular diversity and affirmative action are all-too-material sequels. But the method tempest has stayed safely in its teapot. Postcritique, its most contested category, has no traction outside peer-reviewed pages and stuffy seminar rooms, and increasingly not even there. Today no one I know in academia seems to summon much passion, pro or con, for Felskian method talk. We’re too busy teaching classes, grading exams, pitching papers, wrangling grants. We’re seeking jobs or clinging to the ones we have. (I got rejected from ten university jobs while writing this piece.) In the method wars, tenured generals huddle in the trenches while the infantry flee the battlefield.
And beneath this impasse lies a still deeper dilemma: what the fuck is all this even about? Postcritique has few practicing partisans in large part because no one knows what it actually looks like to “place ourselves in front of the text.” One trawls JSTOR in vain for a certifiably postcritical reading of any text, high or low, from Beloved to Wicked. What to read for, what concepts to mobilize, what contexts to surface; how to stage a work’s affective pull without surrendering to it; how to narrate readerly formation and affective “attachment” without lapsing into memoir or homage — no one has yet built a working model for these self-addressed tasks of the postcritic. This methodological aporia at the center of a notionally method-based discourse gives the whole controversy a tasteless, odorless quality. Method is in the air, but not on the ground. “I find the vagueness of the term to be its singular strength,” Felski has said, of her postcritique coinage.2 I wish one of my students would try this line in an essay.
Kramnick, to his credit, sees the disjunction clearly. The method wars, he writes, have not “really been about method at all, but rather an occasion for a proxy debate about what sort of attitude critics should bear toward their objects of study,” and in turn, about how “important” it is “to claim relevance for interpretive work at a moment of crisis for the discipline’s footing in the academy and the academy’s footing in the world.” His project is to put the method back in “method,” not as a body of theory but as “a kind of craft” — a “discipline-specific” way of doing criticism more than thinking or talking about it. This matters, Kramnick maintains, because what we vaguely term “close reading” is really “a practice of writing.” It is at this level, in the making of phrases and sentences, “that literary humanities tell important truths about the world.”
When the English department is your world, the world starts to look like an English department.
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Criticism and Truth leads us on a theory-agnostic tour of exegetical passages from living literary scholars, in a series of what he calls “scenes from the everyday life of literary criticism.” (Kramnick retains this attractive phrase while conceding that for academics, much of criticism’s “everyday life” occurs in classrooms and offices rather than in print.) His model critics share no hermeneutic platform or politics, but all exhibit “the skilled practice of in-sentence quotation,” as adapted to their interpretive occasions: on war in William Cowper, on Black ontologies in Toni Morrison, on time and personality in George Eliot. Each neatly interpolates primary language and secondary analysis, modeling “the elegance of fit between one’s words and another’s, between a claim and its grip on the world.” The real substance of criticism, Kramnick wants to remind us, happens in such modestly scrupulous acts of “quotation and imitation and summary,” rather than in the jawing homilies and polemics of “method talk.” If the latter conjures a star panel of theory heavies crossing swords before a rapt audience, Kramnick instead ushers us through a side door, into a basement warren where rows of diligent readers sit hunched at their carrels, under a sign that says quiet please: critics at work.
This plainspoken, pomp-deflating pragmatism is welcome as far as it goes, which is, deliberately, not very far. The book can feel uneasily pitched between a specialist handbook and a promotional pamphlet, acknowledging metadisciplinary turmoil while making the work of criticism maximally, blandly approachable. Kramnick is so intent on sidestepping method drama that he too often hides in the wings. “I take no stand in these debates,” he reassures his peers. “I have no desire to change the methods of literary studies. I want only to understand them.” And later: “I don’t want us to change what we do. I want to change how we understand what we do.” For a doggedly engagé reader like Robbins, these shrunken inversions of Marx’s famous eleventh thesis represent exactly the problem.
Kramnick’s reliance on his titular term, “truth,” however wholesome, also appears willfully retrograde — you can just hear de Man groaning from hell. Kramnick, a professor at Yale, seems almost to be searching for sturdy verities with which more endangered colleagues in Florida or West Virginia might arm themselves against budget-raiding deans and Trumpist governors. Likewise, his ongoing recourse to figures of “craft,” “handiwork,” and artisan labor — the word know-how gets a lot of play — makes for cold comfort. After all, nowhere was “craft pride” more stubborn than among early-nineteenth-century journeymen in incipiently mechanizing industries — weavers, tailors, shoemakers — whose working worlds would, within a lifetime, be all but destroyed.
By contrast, the image of the critic that emerges from Guillory’s Professing Criticism is less one of macher dexterity than white-collar ennui. Unlike Gerald Graff’s classic, tightly paced history of the discipline, Professing Literature, which Guillory salutes in his title, Guillory’s book — whose oldest pieces date to the early 2000s — sprawls beyond category: too jumpy chronologically to tell a history, too lattice-like in construction to be only a parcel of essays, too long and labored to work as a practical primer. But luckily for readers incurious about, say, the decline of the classical rhetorical curriculum in the late 19th century (chapter five), Guillory leads with his strongest, newest stuff. His story of American literary studies since its much-narrated if hazily remembered theoretical turn — more or less spanning, as it happens, Guillory’s own career — appears as a closet drama of dashed hopes, misplaced investments, and unachievable aspirations.
From the 1960s on, he writes, “new social movements provided literary study with specifically political aims but not the means of their expression in the public sphere.” The intellectual offshoots of Black power, women’s liberation, and third-worldist struggles found institutional shelter in humanities departments and drove new research programs long after the political moment of the ’60s had passed. When these originating movements were crushed or dissipated, literary studies turned its political energy inward, taking its textual objects “as surrogates for the social totality.” Of these “strategies of surrogacy,” the most pervasive is what Guillory calls “topicality”: academics privilege “political thematics in teaching and scholarship,” with outsize hope for their “socially transformative effects.” A perverse triple cycle ensues. As professionalization draws scholars further into skilled specialism and out of public life, the remit of textual topicality expands, and the duty to intervene in “social totality” deepens — even as totality seems ever further away. This, Guillory says, is the defining “deformation” of literary scholarship: when the English department is your world, the world starts to look like an English department.
Our alternative ecologies, our archives of resistance, our insurgent epistemologies — what do they do, except make a living for ever fewer people every year?
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With a squint, “topicality” and “deformation” can look like the thin euphemisms of a wheezing member of the elbow-patched old guard, grousing about how critics have gotten too political these days. The resemblance surely accounts for both Professing Criticism’s unlikely splash of mainstream coverage and its ambivalent academic reception.3 But this really isn’t Guillory’s meaning. His book does not call on scholars to abandon “political thematics” and restore a prelapsarian formalist order; it only beseeches them to reckon honestly with their tasks and tools. “The absurdity of the situation should be evident to all of us,” he writes at one point, with atypical choler:
As literary study wanes in public importance, as literature departments shrink in size, as majors in literature decline in numbers, the claims for the criticism of society are ever more overstated. In these circumstances, we ought not to pretend that the university is actually rewarding the political work of scholarship.
The most annoying thing about these moments in the book is their icy reality. We’re not changing the world. Anyone who has ever emerged from a multiday academic conference will recognize this truth: as the sun sets on the jetsam of crumpled programs and the custodians vacuum the carpet, you set out for the bus station or the airport and wonder what, and whom, it was all for. Our alternative ecologies, our archives of resistance, our insurgent epistemologies — what do they do, except make a living for ever fewer people every year?
This stepping back and zooming out culminates with the book’s conclusion, “Ratio Studiorum,” where the inveterately nonprescriptive Guillory comes closest to recommending a plan of action for criticism. If literary scholars chronically “misrecognize” their capacities and misdiagnose their condition, then the first task is to dig down to the discipline’s timeless foundations. The chapter — whose pompous Latin title is gamely offset by an epigraph from, if you can believe it, the ska band Fine Young Cannibals — duly proposes “five rationales” for studying literature: the “linguistic/cognitive,” the “moral/judicial,” the “national/cultural,” the “aesthetic/critical,” and the “epistemic/disciplinary.” The doubling in each term signals its dual function as both “positive knowledge and cognitive training” (coefficients drawn, he says, from Francis Bacon’s model of intellectual history). Proceeding at cruising altitude through each rationale, the essay is a marvel of synthetic learning, lucid and fluid. Yet its bid for timelessness slips into a foggy atemporality. In forty-four pages, Guillory declines to name a single living critic whose work models these rationales, with whom we might think, learn, or argue. (Bacon, who died in 1626, appears twenty-seven times.) This sense of remove is by design — Guillory finds it “necessary to set . . . contemporary movements to one side” — yet it leaves the reader feeling far not just from the front lines of method, but far from almost anywhere. For a book so built on parasociological schemata of “disciplines,” “professions,” and “institutions,” Professing Criticism by its end gives oddly little sense of contemporary criticism’s social texture, its look and feel, its work in the world.
On Close Reading dangles the hope of a very different approach. Next to Professing Criticism, Guillory’s new book is slight — just eighty-six pages — but bulked by a mass of long footnotes, forming almost a parallel book.4 Yet while the title might suggest a how-to guide or pithy summa, its operative word turns out to be on: close reading itself figures more as an enigmatic depth to be sounded than a practice to be taught. As Guillory points out, the conventional notion of close reading as merely “careful attention to words on the page” says little about either its critical value or methodological basis. As a technique, close reading was born in a moment of “disciplinary crisis,” Guillory says, as literary studies took shape “between competing modes of reading” practiced by “critics and literary historians”; the theory era’s repudiation of the New Criticism marked a similar rupture. By now we are prepared for what comes next. Today’s method wars — or, in Guillory’s tweedier description, the “extreme oscillation between . . . theoretical poles” that “we are passing through at present” — are in turn “a sure indication of disciplinary crisis.” But wait: “The resurgence of interest in close reading in recent years,” in which Guillory’s book takes part, is itself symptomatic “of an ongoing legitimation crisis, a loss of faith.” Crisis, crisis everywhere — yet far from only a “harbinger of disaster,” he counsels, crisis “can be the occasion for resolution of long-standing problems in theory or practice,” a creative destruction in method.
But through it all, thanks to its “constitutive minimalism of technique,” close reading promises to perdure. The “hermeneutic tradition, with all its interpretive schemes,” Guillory writes, “flows like a jet stream far above close reading’s groundwork.” Where Professing Criticism follows literary studies’ “deformation,” On Close Reading tries to define its bare rudiments. As a disciplinary brief, Guillory’s book is unimpeachably learned, stately, subtle — he is, Stefan Collini has cooed, “the deep man’s deep man” — and written as if in a contest with Kramnick to see who can make the most modest case for the study of English. (“Critics are structurally vulnerable to appeals to modesty,” Robbins has observed. “We exist, we tell ourselves, because the objects we study are so much greater than ourselves” — even if “we get something back for this provisional self-abasement.”) The clearing away of “topicality” at times leaves Guillory to define close reading mainly by what it isn’t. “Close reading as a technique has no ideological or political implications whatsoever,” he insists, any more than does “riding a bicycle.” (The analogy has its limits: compare the “technique” of a Lycra-clad retired podiatrist spinning by on an $8,000 carbon fiber rig with that of a delivery worker dodging traffic on an e-bike, and tell me you can’t spot any politics.)
The darkest prospect for the discipline is not its wholesale dissolution, but its residual subsidy as a loss leader for a few elite schools that can afford it.
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Yet however tightly drawn its boundaries, Guillory’s book fills a striking lacuna in the metaliterature of the English department. As he points out, the term close reading itself was “infrequently invoked” until the late 20th century, least of all by the arch-formalist New Critics with whom it is now so associated. The point bears underlining: from the mid-’30s to the mid-’60s, those dime-store Matthew Arnolds supposedly most wedded to the narrowest kind of close reading — Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and other context-allergic sonnet fetishists of the G.I. Bill halcyon — almost never explained their work in such terms. That this readily verifiable fact escaped notice for so long points to literary studies’ shaky sense of internal historicity. In other humanistic fields, even dated or discarded theories serve to frame current research: to write about, say, the history of Reconstruction, one must know the Confederate-sympathizing Dunning School that dominated historiography of the period a century ago; one can hardly contribute to moral philosophy without engaging Kant’s categorical imperative. For the academic literary critic, by contrast, to cast new ideas in old programmatic molds is to court controversy.5
A combination of institutional inertia and theoretical churn tends to reinforce this recentism. While literary studies is no longer a young discipline, most of its “everyday life,” as Kramnick would have it, occurs in capillary niches of specialization, many of them much younger. More even than in neighboring humanisms, new work in literary studies arrives name-tagged with one of dozens of novel subspecialties whose theoretical corpora reach back no more than a few decades: new modernist studies, affect theory, ecocriticism, lyric theory, animal studies. Of course novelty alone, like specialization, is no vice; if there is lasting life in literary studies, it will be on horizons opened by still-new fields like disability studies and trans studies. But as with artificial intelligence, we can’t trust the manufacturers to distinguish epochal innovations from market-baiting gimmickry. (Remember actor-network theory? How about thing theory?) For all the method warmongering, the progress of academic criticism today looks less like a tale of shifting paradigms or clashing interpretations than of serial conceptual boomlets, each along an analogous arc: a seminal article begets a dedicated conference begets a special issue begets two major monographs and ten minor ones — until all are shuffled off into that graveyard of critical movements, the edited volume.
The crisis thickens, multiplies. We’re too paranoid, and not paranoid enough. Our political ambitions reach too far, until they suddenly seem too small. We talk endlessly about method, only to discover that we were never really talking about method in the first place. After all the abortive revolts, the half-baked polemics, the dead-letter coinages, what have we really won, or lost?
As even most of the combatants would admit, the method wars have staged a bleakly irrelevant sideshow, like a panic over living-room decor as the house burns. The house, or its main wing, is the US university as an employer, institution, and habitus of humanities scholarship, threatened from all sides by near and far dangers: the erosion of tenure lines, the shift to adjunct labor, public disinvestment, administrative bloat, falling undergraduate enrollments, an alleged “reading crisis” among those students who remain, and, most acutely, reactionary attacks on faculty freedom and student protest. Fred Moten has said that “the university is a kind of corpse,” “a dead institutional body.” It’s more like a zombie, mobile but stiff limbed, undead but unconscious, lumbering in the dark, hungry for brains.
A customary joke among grad students is that this or that rich private university is really a hedge fund or real estate developer that happens to run a university. (Columbia and NYU, the two largest private landowners in New York City, pay almost no property taxes on their multibillion-dollar portfolios.) More true than not, this line nevertheless misses some of the strangeness of the university as a hybrid institution with competing, confused functions: any actual asset manager would have long ago bulldozed the literature departments and thrown up a mid-market condo complex called The Novel. Yet literature continues to be studied, taught, and even written there, and while the returns have dwindled to nearly nothing, cultural capital — as detailed in Guillory’s landmark 1993 book of that title — still accrues to the transmission of literary knowledge. With entire language departments in fiscal and existential jeopardy at public universities and small colleges, the darkest prospect for literary studies is not its wholesale dissolution, but its residual subsidy as a loss leader for a few elite schools that can afford it.
Facing such decimation, you might think criticism’s tenured guardians would at last look to press on their own institutional leverage points. You’d be wrong. Last October, in a belated sequel to its refusal to join the boycott of South African apartheid in the 1980s, the Executive Council of the discipline’s crumbling main pillar, the Modern Language Association, blocked a resolution to endorse the BDS movement and denounce Israeli scholasticide in Gaza. The stated reasoning was at least refreshingly materialist: backlash to the resolution would have lost the MLA too much money. “We acknowledge that phrases such as ‘fiduciary review’ and conversations about revenue can sound callous in the face of atrocity,” the council members wrote near the end of a long, anguished statement. Close readers to the end.
And so, inside the university, the greatest promise more and more appears to lie in intellectual life outside the university.6 Since the 2008–09 financial crisis, a widening constellation of “public humanities” programs and grants have sought, via multimedia projects, museum exhibitions, and online symposia, to open scholarship to nonacademic audiences, and more covertly, to forge parallel career paths for masses of disappointed academic job seekers. (The apotheosis surely came last year with the founding of a new academic journal — peer-reviewed! — called Public Humanities. At least it’s not paywalled.) Good people do valuable work under these auspices, but as a project to democratize the academy, public humanities suffers from, to put it Marxistly, an incurable idealism — a symptom of crisis that wants to be a solution, a dream of inventing new systems from above and conjuring new publics from below.
After journeying under dark disciplinary clouds, Kramnick, too, looks to the sunny promise of a revived “public-facing criticism,” whose “vitality” he attributes directly “to the present crisis in higher education.” A host of small and midsize magazines reliably offer “work and an audience for scholars marooned by the present employment catastrophe.” Yet the university’s sheltering function will be hard to replicate. Outside it, Kramnick writes, “there is finally nothing for public criticism like the system-wide infrastructure of employment” that “built criticism as we know it.” And without internal protocols or outside pressure even to simulate meritocracy, such livelihoods as can be made in journalistic criticism run on “a mixture of patronage, connections, and elite bias,” Kramnick says, that recalls “the old-boy network in its most extreme forms.”
Nor will a lasting rapprochement between academic and public critical modes be easily won. Turned on their head, the strengths of the best journalistic criticism — rhetorical dynamism, crisp prose, topical voracity, casual erudition — reveal exactly its faults: overheated rhetoric, stylistic preciosity, patchy dilettantism, flimsy citation. (In Kramnick’s diplomatic formulation, public “debate” lacks “the archival persistence and citational evolution of scholarly argument.”) In turn, the monochrome prose, tunnel-vision specialism, and citational exhaustion of academic criticism might only be the underside of sobriety, rigor, and expertise. And all this says nothing of the vast, unmapped domain of what could be called mass or consumer criticism that lives on online forums and social media. These infinitely tessellating micropublics of personal taste, however hermeneutically foreshortened, are the nearest thing to criticism many people will read, let alone write, and they still await comprehensive study. If you want to know what really attaches us to art, you’d do better to scroll IMDb than read PMLA.
You can just hear de Man groaning from hell.
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But do you really want to know? I wonder, revisiting Felski and others, how much attachment we can stand. Measured by audience, literary reading occupies a remote, cobwebbed corner of our cultural logic compared with television, video games, and podcasts. Of course, panics over literacy are practically a corollary of mass literacy itself — but so, too, until a couple generations ago, was the educability of taste. In his primordial 1920s accounts of critical method, I. A. Richards cheerfully took it as given that most Anglophone readers were fools, their taste cramped by convention and sensibility stunted by torrid poetry and schlocky novels. “The artist is concerned with the record and perpetuation of the experiences . . . most worth having,” he wrote, and the critic’s task was to discover and teach “which experiences are most valuable.” With Practical Criticism in 1929, Richards helped invent an enduring genre of professorial commentary that I’ve come to call My Idiot Students, where anecdotes of undergraduates’ semiliterate gaffes and misprisions are spun, not without sympathy, into parables of interpretive method.7
If postcritique represented one kind of escape hatch, then its opposite is a defeated retreat into snobbery. Open contempt of mass taste may never again find much quarter in academia, but old hierarchies can still be refounded, brick by brick. In his 2021 book A Defense of Judgment, Case Western Reserve professor Michael Clune cannily repositions “aesthetic judgment,” in its most traditionally ranking and discriminating form, as an “enduring bulwark against [art’s] total reduction to market value.” This Adornian hand-me-down is presented — in a moony, perambulatory way — as a leftist project, but the dialectical signal has been degraded in transmission from Frankfurt to Cleveland. If we seek to “free aesthetic education to erect a new world within the old,” Clune insists to his academic peers, we must “loosen . . . equality’s hold on our political imagination.”8 Inequality in the name of equality: an idea whose time has come.
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Simon During places Clune’s Defense at the head of a cluster of recent books — including Guillory’s and Kramnick’s — that together signal, he says, a “conservative turn in literary studies.” But any “conservative turn” that has room, as During’s does, for both Clune and Terry Eagleton — a lifelong Marxist who has done more than anyone to knock aesthetic judgment from its pedestal in literary theory — obscures more than it reveals. Within the discipline, political reaction still poses less threat than political confusion, at once complacent and crisis ridden.
Just outside the discipline, meanwhile, reaction reigns everywhere. On Thursday afternoons, I go to a university campus to teach literature to undergraduates. I shuffle along with the crowd, passing slowly through a narrow opening in the metal police barricade that lines the sidewalk. I walk up a set of concrete steps to an even narrower opening, in the middle of a high plywood wall erected around a plaza where Gaza solidarity encampments bloomed last spring. Today the plaza is closed to the public and hidden from the street; it’s a place people enter only in order to leave. At the wall I have to tap my school ID card on a scanner attached to a security booth, under the bored gaze of guards in fake cop uniforms. I walk across the wide, unoccupiable plaza to the building entrance, where I have to scan my ID card again. I go downstairs one floor, then another, to the windowless subbasement classroom where I teach.
On this Thursday, Mahmoud Khalil is illegally imprisoned in Louisiana; a few days before his kidnapping, $400 million in research funding to Columbia, his former university, had been summarily canceled by the Trump Administration; a week later, the university would fire and expel the president of the student workers union for his Palestine activism, on the eve of union contract negotiations. Today I’m teaching Antigone. As I enter the classroom, students are trickling in, taking their seats, opening laptops, chatting quietly. Soon we’ll talk about Antigone and Creon, about family loyalty, public grief, and civil rebellion. When it’s time to start class, half the students have yet to arrive — some of them slowed, perhaps, by the building’s double security bottlenecks. Now this, I think, is a scene from the everyday life of criticism.
More than to method, craft, or critique, I keep returning to deception — to the truths we feel for blindly, that we reach, as the wily Belgian fox said, only by “a wishful assertion of the opposite.” Even the shoddiest simulacra of progress have stalled: corporations have canceled diversity initiatives and scrubbed any mention of climate change from their public relations. A demon-eyed, drug-addled billionaire humiliates, fires, starves, and kills people around the world at will, while claiming to do nothing of the sort. There are men in power trying to remake universities as police precincts, to render the study of social difference unthinkable, and to confine the reading and teaching of literature, where it is possible at all, to the recitation of brain-dead nostalgia. This is not the world that Kramnick’s and Guillory’s books describe, but it is the world they inhabit. That we can even pretend to fight wars over method, that we can imagine new tasks for criticism or new defenses of truth, in a political culture of delusory brutality, is a melancholy blessing. Will anyone still write books like this a generation, a decade, a year from now? Will anyone read them? Who will be around to miss our crisis when it’s gone?
Felski’s The Limits of Critique, published in 2015, likewise still rankles, as shown by a major chapter of Robbins’s book. Guillory, too, devotes a skeptical chapter of Professing Criticism to the postcritical moment, wryly titled “Critique of Critical Criticism.” ↩
Deep into The Limits of Critique, Felski resorts to mocking the word critique itself: the harsh rhoticity and plosion of its syllables, she suggests, just sound so mean, “like a weapon.” ↩
Since the death of Harold Bloom, the legacy media—still populated by onetime English majors with hazy memories of chalk-scented lecture halls—have hungered for a quotable patriarch of the professoriate who can match Bloom’s elegant bloviation and soft-sided humanism. A Times write-up on Professing Criticism angled to conscript the silver-haired, recently retired Guillory in the role, which he is nevertheless too circumspect to inhabit. ↩
In the notes Guillory adjudicates a vast secondary literature that remains discreetly offstage in the main text. That literature is further itemized in the book’s annotated bibliography and accompanying online archive, both compiled by Scott Newstok. Complete with summaries, sample passages, and embedded links, the archive tabulates seemingly every mention or description of “close reading” and its antecedents in English since the 16th century—an astonishing and faintly Ozymandian monument of scholarly metadata. ↩
As much as his drive-by downratings of seemingly every living literary scholar, North’s provocation in Literary Criticism was to reanimate I. A. Richards’s long-buried practicum as a viable template rather than just a citational souvenir. Aversion to atavism runs deep enough that even some critics who might be expected to appreciate aspects of North’s project have been put off: Robbins, in a Tim Walz moment, curtly rejects North’s use of Richards as “weird.” ↩
From one view, publicly engaged critics have always inhabited the university’s margins and interstices. In his revelatory recent book Outside Literary Studies, Andy Hines profiles a cohort of midcentury Black writer-scholars who were only tenuously attached to academia—Langston Hughes, Melvin Tolson, Gwendolyn Bennett, and others—and whose aesthetic politics challenged the whitewashed aridity of the New Criticism. ↩
Then again, as Marco Roth noted in his review of North’s Literary Criticism for this magazine, “to read the student responses to Richards’s literary exercises” today feels like being “ushered down the corridor to the perfect tutorial we never attended.” ↩
The “new world” came sooner than even Clune might have hoped. In January, he submitted testimony in support of a bill in the Ohio state senate (which has since passed) that would ban DEI programs, undercut tenure, and forbid strikes by full-time faculty at the state’s public universities. Apparently these sacrifices were necessary to restore what Clune, in his statement, called—alas, poor Kramnick—“the pursuit of truth.” ↩
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