Abstract This essay provides a thorough analysis of Bruce Robbins’s, Jonathan Kramnick’s, and John Guillory’s recent books on the state of the discipline of literary criticism. In spite of the otherwise vast differences between these books, the authors have three shared commitments. They assume that criticism (understood as the reading of literature) still remains the main focus of departments of literary study. They work with an overwhelmingly male canon of theorists. Although women are invoked as examples, men remain the thought-leaders. They all ignore, neglect, or mischaracterize the concerns of philosophies investigating judgment, experience, and subjectivity. As a result, they present us with an image of a profession in which it is taboo to invoke ordinary experience as a starting point for investigations. By focusing on Robbins’s and Guillory’s response to Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (and thus to the phenomenon of postcritique), and by bringing out Kramnick’s commitment to positivism and formalism, I conclude that Robbins and Kramnick look to the past for salvation, whereas Guillory shows that the future is unlikely to be any different from the present. The effect of professionalization and disciplinary pressures make academic critics highly resistant to the new.
Toril Moi (Mon,) studied this question.