Professing Literature: An Institutional History Book

In this book, Graff provides an overview of the history of critical debates taking place within English departments between the nineteenth-century to the present day. Graff's argument is centered on the notion that the humanistic ideal with which we currently associate literature departments is a myth; in fact, there are many conflicts that take place behind the scenes that students are not privy to until they are resolved (or managed in some way) by scholars and critics. At this point, the values of the debates are lost on the students, who are merely presented with a methodology of the history of literature that Graff terms "the field coverage model." At an administrative level, the field coverage model works to separate the history of literature into analysis of distinct time periods, cultures, and societies that do not necessarily intersect (allowing every graduate student to "specialize" in a time period - note the connections here outside of literature and to all of the humanities), and while scholars and critics at the graduate level and above work out the various approaches to not only teaching these subjects but researching and writing about them, students are left on their own in some parts to work out the interdisciplinary connections between literary time periods, authors, and texts. It is evident that the field coverage model has many benefits (self-regulating and therefore timeless, organizes literature, expresses humanism, etc.) and that it is here to stay, however, that does not mean it shouldn't be revised and built upon. For one, Graff argues that these methodological conflicts should be introduced in the classroom, where students can not only be made privy to them but also help shape the future of the curriculum and critical debates. Secondly, Graff emphasizes the importance of using the concept of the interdisciplinary within literary studies itself, in order to make connections within the curriculum that are missing.

The history of these literary conflicts are not only at the level of pedagogy but also at the level of textual analysis and therefore at the level of ideology, where approaches to literature in the traditional method of the eighteenth-century involving rote memorization of classical poetry became transformed after the nineteenth-century towards other learning methods. While the New Critics of the early twentieth-century were more concerned with the explication of texts without appeal to external sources, traditional Humanists who entered later on in the scene found that there was a need for the discipline's return to morality as a centre of analysis, with political/ethical principles highlighted in textual analysis, and not ignored or dismissed in the way that the New Critics had done. In a meta-analysis itself, Graff uses a historical and sociological approach to explain the political circumstances which lead to the disinterestedness of the New Critics in approaching literature outside of the narrow boundaries of mere explication. At the same time, Graff recognizes that a historical approach alone is not the answer in our understanding of a literary text: the combination of the historical and the intuitive reading of a text, or as Graff calls it, the internal and external, are what together makes the field of literary criticism. Graff makes the unique argument that what is internal for one reader may be external for another, and vice versa, and I found this to be one of the strongest arguments in the chapters I read, outside of the argument of Graff's main thesis.

Literary humanists and critics were influential in bringing to the discipline what we now most often associate it with, such as the close reading of a select few texts, the turn towards history/culture/society as contexts of said texts, and interpretations of apparent themes and moral/political ideologies which can either occur from an intuitive reading or external knowledge or both. A conflict however, arose within the field of criticism itself, Graff argues, and with the critical methodology of literary studies came various conflicts concerning aesthetics as a value, formalistic approaches to literature, and whether ideological interpretations posited a type of relativistic world view in the pedagogy.

In this book, Graff does not spend much time identifying and explaining the various fields of literary criticism to the reader (New Criticism, Formalism, Humanism, Marxism/Ideology, etc.) mostly because they are secondary to the main questions of the book, which are questions such as: what is the value of literature? How should literature be taught, presented, and read? With knowledge of their history, what can we do to improve the state of literature departments today? Still, in reading this book you can get an idea of what approaches towards literature are associated with each of these fields.

Overall, I found Graff's book very insightful, especially having been familiar with literary theories in the past, but not the critical debates about them. I do think that he is in some ways too theoretical for his own good - there are many instances where Graff proposes solutions for the discipline which, in practice, would be hard to initiate, as good as they may sound on paper. Graff's suggestions of unity however are very important; he has established that in the history of critical methodology it has often been scholars versus critics, and it seems that a combination of the work of both groups is what brings literary studies to its heights today. Graff's emphasis on the lack of interdisciplinary approaches within the pedagogy is very true, and I have seen it myself, and I think his suggestions for improvement of curriculums - while written in the 1980s - are still very much needed today. Students do a great job of making connections not only between classes but between their coursework, however, they should not be the ones to bear the weight of this duty, as it should be something already part of the curriculum itself. Otherwise, we lose a lot of insights in literature, as Graff argues, that can bring the discipline forward.

P.S. I really loved Graff's emphasis and outline of the beliefs of specific literary critics in this book - his comments on critic John Crowe Ransom taught me new things I didn't know about him, and also situated his thought within a wider critical debate that I wasn't previously aware of. It is evident that in order to understand the literary theories, we must in part understand the debates that took place around them, and for this purpose Graff did an excellent job with this book.