{"id":50860,"date":"2022-11-23T10:00:26","date_gmt":"2022-11-23T16:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=50860"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:16:48","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:16:48","slug":"reading-after-the-university-english-departments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/reading-after-the-university-english-departments\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading after the University"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s no news that the university is in crisis. Foreign-language departments have perhaps been the most affected, but few humanities programs have gone unscathed. English departments form the subject of two new attempts to provide a backstory to our present disorder: Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University<\/em> by Andy Hines and Professing Criticism<\/em>: Essays on the Organization of Literary Studies<\/em> by John Guillory. Both depict literary study within universities as something strange and recent. And both situate the university in longer stories of racial capitalism and class distinction.<\/em> Taken together, they provide a sobering analysis of the limited political potential of today\u2019s English departments.<\/p>\n

At the same time, amid this morass of dysfunction, both books soothe themselves with the fact that the university has no monopoly on reading. Students are never confined to the official syllabus. Some part of literature and literary study has always been eccentric to the university curriculum, and accounts of the \u201coutside\u201d of university-based practices, like the one Hines finds in a Black radical tradition that emphasized literature\u2019s political potentials, could proliferate in many directions. Disciplinary outsides and eccentricities have tended to negatively inform professional<\/em> literature scholars\u2019 assertions that study of \u201ctheir\u201d objects requires specialist training in unique methods, or that university-based study of literature is the most inherently humanizing or importantly political reading practice. Guillory and Hines flip the script. By treating the professional literary academic as only one kind of reader, they suggest that attention to the varieties of reading practice ongoing outside the university may be an optimism appropriate to our contemporary moment.<\/p>\n

\n

Both books part ways with what Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell describe as a liberal \u201ccrisis consensus\u201d that envisions universities as inherently progressive institutions that need only be saved from the recent ravages of neoliberal privatization.1<\/a><\/sup> Hines depicts the English department as having been an \u201cinstitutionalized cultural space governed by whiteness and anticommunism.\u201d In his telling, the postwar establishment of the new criticism, which foregrounded close reading of the text as a self-contained aesthetic object, helped ground the emerging postwar hegemony of US liberal capitalism, which imagined itself as an apolitical unity-amid-diversity in opposition to mandated Soviet conformity. None of this could have happened without demonizing left and communist Black intellectuals who treated culture as an engine of revolutionary transformation.<\/p>\n

In turn, Guillory\u2019s historical breadth\u2014encompassing the rise and fall of rhetoric, belle lettres, philology, and more\u2014supplements some of Hines\u2019s archival work on the late 1940s and 1950s. Guillory understands the new criticism as just one piece of a massive sociological and methodological shift that made the literary object a \u201cverbal work of art\u201d and, built around it, the English department as a site of disciplinary expertise. By subordinating documentary or political aspects of the text to \u201can aesthetic ontology,\u201d English professors granted themselves jurisdiction over literary inquiry, and thus a role within the university in servicing the expanding professional-managerial class.<\/p>\n

In Hines\u2019s account, the new criticism enabled the racialized exploitation and exclusion of some people to secure the freedom of others within the \u201cstate-academic apparatus.\u201d \u201cBlack writers, Black leftists, and communist affiliates who sought to build institutions around the critical study of Black literature,\u201d among them Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Melvin B. Tolson, fought the new criticism\u2019s consolidation with US institutions, seeking instead an interracial coalition that would challenge American capitalism and \u201cthe ills of racial liberalism.\u201d Their radical vision of future possibility was undermined by a \u201cracist interpretation complex\u201d that made \u201cthe imagining of such efforts, and the efforts themselves, appear improbable.\u201d The causal claim is important here: it is the racist interpretation complex, backed by and embodied within the new criticism, that undermined the work of those committed to using the study of literature and culture in service of radical social transformation.<\/p>\n

Hines\u2019s interest lies in the political and economic circumstances that have shaped methodologies for literary study. His is a form of attention that has itself been denigrated by the new critical formalisms that interest him, which would insist that one \u201cfocus on the text\u201d or \u201clook at the literature itself.\u201d You may object that these kinds of new critical approaches in their purest expression are not especially resonant anymore in the contemporary English department. You may even say that approaches indicting new critical work as apolitical formalism\u2014a tradition of critique to which Hines adds\u2014have been more characteristic of the discipline since the late 1960s.<\/p>\n

This is where Guillory\u2019s account comes in. His sociology of the institution explains why, long after new criticism\u2019s fall from grace, the English department continues to be relatively homogenous. For despite Hines\u2019s materialist interest in the political-economic backgrounds framing literary inquiry, he attributes more agency than does Guillory to the new criticism as an intellectual formation, describing it variously as a \u201ccrucial instrument,\u201d an \u201cintegral part,\u201d and as having \u201cplayed an important role\u201d in the establishment of English as a discipline of whiteness and anticommunism that rejects political approaches to literature as a betrayal of its true import. Unlike the revolutionary conceptions of culture that flourished in the people\u2019s schools, in which writing could express and shape radical consciousness of the need for social transformation, \u201cnew Critical methods denied the possibility of criticism garnering any material force,\u201d Hines argues. Does a critical tendency\u2019s own self-conception undermine its material force, or do the material forces shaping study already relegate criticism to a particular role, at best a handmaiden or a message force multiplier?<\/p>\n

Guillory explains the purportedly depoliticized approach to texts by zooming out from the new criticism per se to the general modus operandi of the postwar credentialing university. The whole college-educated professional profile, whatever the discipline, sought not radical political upheaval but rather social distinction on the way to a professional career. The English department was simply subservient to this larger process. The nature of the university as such has made even work that is the furthest possible thing from the new criticism\u2014even the most avowedly communist literary critique\u2014no more nor less actually politically effective than its apparent rival. Criticism is always mediated through the professional profile and the cultivating nature of the school, and literary criticism established itself in the university as access to a curriculum developed and delivered by experts, which would expose students to elite achievement in vernacular expression as they went about earning the degrees that would help them climb the social ladder.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Guillory and Hines suggest that attention to the varieties of reading practice ongoing outside the university may be an optimism appropriate to our contemporary moment.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Three decades ago, Guillory\u2019s influential Cultural Capital<\/em> attacked the whole premise of the canon wars. The combatants assumed that it mattered meaningfully for creation of an inclusive social world what people read in literature classrooms. They mistook or substituted the exclusionary classroom for a possibly inclusive social world. These arguments are revisited and deepened in Professing Criticism<\/em>, which warns against examining \u201cthe school\u201d in isolation from the total world. Just as the new criticism cannot be understood on its own terms but must be indexed to a broader historical development and social transformation of the function of the university\u2014which had no space for the study of vernacular literature at all until the twentieth century\u2014the university has to be understood in relation to its special social function within a society defined by inequality and labor market sorting. \u201cThose who see only the school do not see the school,\u201d he writes; \u201cthe institution and its organizational forms of discipline and profession filter and sometimes even transmogrify the messages that emanate from it.\u201d The mediating function of the institution is to quiet and corral. Whatever the nature of the intervention, the contours of professional life mean that its primary value will be to someone\u2019s list of publications or case for promotion. \u201cCriticism of the text can also be the criticism of society,\u201d Guillory writes, \u201cwith the proviso that arguments about the political implication of literary works are distinguishable from the politics of scholarship itself<\/em>, from the estimation of its aims or effects.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Hines argues that the English department was deliberately structured in such a way as to exclude attention to racial capitalism and US empire, not least via deference to the new critical insistence that one focus on the text \u201citself,\u201d Guillory\u2019s account ramifies beyond the new criticism, fixing our gaze on the sociology of the university institution as a space of cultivating distinction and prestige for professional advance\u2014social sorting processes that are always racialized, as Hines would remind us. A university\u2019s institutional functioning as such<\/em> guarantees a level of exclusiveness and training in apolitical managerial ways of being in the world. Put at its simplest: What is more antiblack and anti-communist, the new criticism, or the cost of tuition?<\/p>\n

Though the breadth of Guillory\u2019s history is wide, he is careful to indicate that the conditions for the study of English are increasingly bad just now, and he skewers other scholars\u2014the Latourian post-critique people in particular\u2014for somehow managing to think that it was \u201csuspicious reading\u201d and not student debt that drove people out of the English department. It seems like a strange shift, then, when he argues that the contemporary crisis is actually \u201cnot the one that usually goes by this name\u2014the collapse of the job market for PhDs, funding reductions, or a decline in the number of majors\u2014but rather the one that is internal to the development of the discipline, the question of its justification<\/em>.\u201d Why separate the material situation from the problem of justification, in this way? Again, is it any critical tendency\u2019s self-conception that undermines its material force, or do the material forces shaping study already relegate criticism to a particular role?<\/p>\n

For as we have seen, even if it still entails percolating amid the bourgeois sociolect and disposition of the college educated, today\u2019s university is no longer taken for granted as a sufficient path to upward mobility and professional-managerial training, and this becomes truer the further one looks beyond the most elite institutions. Guillory makes the case, in fact, that the \u201cappeal of the PhD is a consequence of the decline in the value of the BA,\u201d as students no longer feel remotely certain that a BA is \u201cenough\u201d of a degree to give them a leg up. His response to these conditions is to point to the nature of the university itself as a reality that limits the possibilities for any other arrangement; in short, his sociology would counsel resignation about the possibility of a different kind of institution. In his argument, the education system \u201cexists in part for the purpose of preparing aspirants to compete for places in a hierarchy of labor\u201d; it is a social sorting mechanism, not a democratized open space where anyone can come to learn. Thus, for Guillory, people coming to graduate school expecting a secure place in the profession are only ever misunderstanding what it means to exist in an unequal social world where only some people can secure those accoutrements of the highest success, with others necessarily ranged somewhere below.<\/p>\n

This resigned perspective helps to explain, I think, why Guillory understands the legitimation crisis in the way that he does: ultimately, as a matter of failed justifications. It also explains perhaps how muted his proposed solutions are, and how thoroughly in the realm of discourse: strengthen the discipline\u2019s self-conception, develop its capacity to identify and explain its object, and figure out how on earth it \u201ccan serve the reading of literature\u201d going forward. These solutions seem to fall back on the same kinds of cul-de-sac arguments that he is known for so disliking. One wants to ask how any of these vague aspirations might be mediated in such a way as to reach the kind of audience that would push for more funding and lead to growing numbers of enrollments and good jobs. The point is, of course, that these are the wrong questions. None of these saving gestures are ultimately tabled as practicable, given, one supposes, absent capacity and desire today\u2014realities that are never formally taken up by Guillory, but that remain a necessary backstory to his fatalist disposition toward literary criticism\u2019s absent future.<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Interviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n \u201cAt the End of Everything\u201d: Talking with Shannon Mattern<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Hannah <\/a>\n \n Hannah Zeavin <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

The walls falling down around us were almost never sturdy\u2014maybe only for that brief moment that Guillory describes as the \u201cpostwar settlement,\u201d the English department\u2019s lightning-flash version of the \u201cpostwar compact,\u201d through which the advanced capitalist democracies secured their dynamic economies, absorptive labor markets, and relatively expansive social spending in the first few decades after WWII. What was the new criticism if not a form of expression of the postwar compact within the department of English, providing an ostensibly accessible pedagogy that growing ranks of students could quickly learn and easily deploy in their own reading practice? Just as historians of the postwar compact have pointed to its pacifying, racializing, and gendering effects\u2014the priority accorded to the nuclear household of the waged white male breadwinner and unwaged homebound housewife\u2014Hines\u2019s work thoroughly critiques the antiblackness and antiradicalism of the English department\u2019s postwar settlement.2<\/a><\/sup> It makes sense then that, like Guillory, he refuses to imagine that what he calls the \u201cstate-academic apparatus\u201d can be replenished with lush funds and a sufficiently revolutionary impetus. Hines allies instead, finally, with something like a new instantiation of a people\u2019s school: the \u201cundercommons,\u201d a term coined by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney to refer to the cultivation, both inter- and extracurricular, both within and outside the university, of communities with their sights already set on emerging futures of \u201cfugitive\u201d study\u2014study that will continue even after the humanities university is finally behind us.3<\/a><\/sup> Guillory is also thinking about something like this undercommons, I would argue, though his name for it is the \u201clay reader.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certainly, Hines\u2019s take on the contemporary situation points to precisely what Guillory tends to sideline: the university\u2019s role as a site of production of indebted life, or what Boggs and Mitchell label \u201caccumulation-by-education,\u201d indicting both the student-loan regime and the expanding campus of carparks, privately funded science labs, and sports stadiums.4<\/a><\/sup> Hines and Guillory agree that the English department has never not been in the midst of an unfolding crisis: for Hines, this is a matter of the ordinary but deepening devastating crisis of racial capitalism; for Guillory, of the shaky foundations of the degree\u2019s status as expert professional accreditation and elite distinction.<\/p>\n

Neither book makes the familiar plea to save the university from the privatizing capitalists who have undermined its formerly ensconced public mission. In their respective ways, Hines and Guillory instead conclude that reading as such does not rise and fall with the fate of the university. All that a book historian like me can add is this: if you want to support readers and help them develop their practice, the best hope will always be helping to do away with economic compulsion and the division of labor, those main determinants of how we spend our time and develop our capacities and interests. Worthy work, perhaps, for the English department\u2019s last instructors?<\/p>\n

This article was commissioned by Leah Price<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

  1. Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell, \u201cCritical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus,\u201d Feminist Studies<\/em>, vol. 44, no. 2 (2018). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. See M. E. O\u2019Brien, \u201cTo Abolish the Family: The Working-Class Family and Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development<\/a>,\u201d Endnotes<\/em>, no. 5 (2019). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  3. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study<\/em><\/a> (Minor Compositions, 2013). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  4. Boggs and Mitchell, \u201cCritical University Studies,\u201d 453. \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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