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which is still the peak body for language and literature studies in the United States. Then, however, under the influence of New Criticism, close reading became the dominant method on college syllabi until about the 1980s, when it was supplanted by New Historicism and contextual approaches to literature placing more emphasis on variables of race, ethnicity, and gender. It was during the middle years of the twentieth century that literary studies achieved its greatest popularity and prestige in terms of student enrolments and general cultural influence. In the twenty-first century, as Guillory notes, the ‘proliferation of new media has displaced literature itself from its historical position as the premier medium of entertainment and edification’, probably permanently.

Professing Criticism is, however, no jeremiad. As an experienced university administrator who has served on several MLA committees, Guillory has many pragmatic suggestions for improving organisational structures. He recommends re-establishing the theory of rhetoric more securely within the subject’s disciplinary base, enhancing the ‘teaching of writing’, which he says ‘should occupy a much larger place in the disciplinary universe than it does today’. He also seeks to recover the ‘Baconian sweep’ that characterised criticism in earlier eras, rather than relapsing into the ‘professional deformation’ arising from intellectual incarceration within overly rigid ‘period specializations’. He offers some eminently sensible suggestions for improving everyday processes in English departments, including keeping closer track of PhDs who have moved into other professions, so that a graduate school education can be properly understood as training students for a world wider than just the corridors of academe. He also suggests establishing more sophisticated protocols to distinguish ‘brilliant teachers’, who exercise a longterm though more indirect impact on their students, from merely ‘popular teachers’, who are much easier to recognise.

Despite these invaluable pointers, it is hard not to feel that Guillory’s critiques arise from a position very much inside the American academic networks that he interrogates. He is not particularly interested in university conditions outside the United States, and the question of World Literature is handled pusillanimously in his chapter on ‘The Contradictions of Global English’, where he suggests that although transnational approaches might be desirable in theory, for his own department they presented ‘pedagogic difficulties’ that were ‘finally too great to solve’. Guillory floats the idea that one answer to the common problem of dwindling enrolments might be to split the English major into ‘two tracks,’ one focusing on the history of English and American literature ‘culminating in modernism’, the other centred upon ‘literature in English’ written after World War II, ‘with an orientation toward issues of social identity’.

Such a scheme would, I think, be counter-productive for several reasons. First, it would deny to earlier literature the benefit of revisionist insights that have always enlivened critical studies of classic literature. As T.S. Eliot wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, all tradition is necessarily modified retrospectively, with Virginia Woolf for example coming to appear a different writer after the work of Doris Lessing or J.M. Coetzee. Second, Guillory’s proposal would place a structural divide between contemporary literature and the earlier work that can throw it into discursive relief. William Burroughs, to take another example, is a more interesting satirist if you are familiar with the work of Jonathan Swift. Guillory himself clearly understands the importance of these connections, testifying ‘that teaching students how to read literature that is not immediately relatable to their self-identification is one of the most important things we do’. His notion of how to solve problems of curriculum and enrolment thus seems depressingly designed to place economic considerations before any intellectual rationale.

Guillory’s central theme is that ‘professing criticism’ is a contradiction in terms, since criticism has traditionally been considered something for amateurs

This is a book full of local insights but a bit amorphous in its overall direction, without quite the sharpness of Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature (1987), to which ‘landmark work’ Guillory pays homage in his preface. Whereas Graff outlined a convincing overview of how literary criticism had evolved institutionally over the course of the twentieth century, Guillory seems sometimes to get too distracted by contingent affairs, especially of a business and organisational nature. He is good at negative critique, commenting astutely on the ‘weak humanism’ of the idea that the humanities should be seen as enjoying a privileged relation to the human world, something he says in this digital age ‘has never been less true’. He is also perceptive on how ‘the European “professorial” structure’ was gradually overtaken by the American departmental model, which ‘came to dominate both systems’, though he is not so cognisant of how this in turn has come under pressure recently, in Australia but also Asia, from a more centralised system where university administrators set priorities according to mandates driven by national governments. He does comment on how over the course of the twentieth century ‘a managerial cadre – the university administration (specifically, its upper stratum) – has successfully wrested control over the conditions of work from the faculty, the corps of professional knowledge workers’; but the tenure system in the United States provides a level of legal security for academic freedom that is crucially more difficult to sustain in Asia and Australia.

There is, of course, nothing new about authoritarian directives of this kind. In 1284, King Edward I of England was so suspicious of how the ‘traditional poetry’ of Welsh bards had made an impression on the minds of his subjects that he ordered all the bards to be brought together and put to death, a purge that David Hume in his History of England laconically described as ‘barbarous though not absurd policy’. Literary studies, like literature itself, have long been compelled to dodge institutional bullets. Given their aesthetic capacity to play on fantasies and fears that are not reducible to the more impersonal grids of social science, it is arguable that the subject is at its most effective when resisting more sanctimonious guidelines dictated by academic bureaucracies or instrumental agendas of the political state. g

Paul Giles is Professor of English at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. His most recent book is The Planetary Clock: Antipodean time and spherical postmodern fictions (OUP, 2021).