John Guillory's Distortions

When considering the work of the gray eminences who presided over the decline of literary studies, we should reverse the famous judgment about Harry Truman. While they got some small things right, they got all the big things wrong.1 John Guillory's new book Professing Criticism holds a special interest by serving as a kind of summation and epitaph for the work of his generation of literary scholars. Guillory argues that the sacrifice of criticism's social aims was necessary for its formation as a rigorous discipline. But in fact the book demonstrates through its own errors and omissions that the field's abandonment of its social purpose entailed the compromise of its intellectual standards.Guillory's story about the advent of literary studies as an academic discipline begins with a brief account of journalistic literary criticism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These critics addressed large publics and attempted to cultivate literary tastes while critiquing industrial capitalism—or, to put it more precisely, to resist industrial capitalism by cultivating modes of reception and attention that opened spaces beyond the market's depredations. But once criticism migrated into the academy, it found itself forced to give up the social purpose animating its journalistic incarnation in favor of a process of specialization and formalization. After retailing this mistaken history, Guillory wrongly diagnoses the field's present condition and proceeds to offer a bad prescription for its future.Guillory argues that criticism's mid-twentieth-century success at dominating academic English departments came at the cost of a tension that eventually undermined both its disciplinary prestige and its social reach. He draws on Nietzsche's analysis of the "deformation" of scholars, showing how intense specialization in esoteric objects of study limits their grasp of larger human questions. In the case of literary criticism, this deformation took an especially acute form, given the ghostly persistence of criticism's very different shape before entering the schools. Academic critics were torn between their specialized academic interest in a narrow set of works in a medium of diminishing social importance and their desire—an inheritance from the critics of the nineteenth century—to make important political interventions.This tension, Guillory argues, led to the current sorry state of the field, in which critics' grandiose political pronouncements combines with their expertise in interpreting difficult literary texts, to the detriment of both. The field produces knowledge with a low intellectual status in the ecology of academic disciplines—along with the low funding such status entails—and faces shrinking student majors and enrollments—all while failing to have a significant political impact.The key moment in Guillory's history of academic criticism—as it is for such previous historians of the field as Gerald Graff and Joseph North—involves the advent of the New Criticism in the 1940s and 1950s. Whereas earlier modes of criticism depended on the sensibilities and styles of individual critics and translated poorly into the university setting, the New Critics developed a method of approaching literary works that yielded a precise professional discourse that could be replicated in classrooms and debated in books and journals.Guillory argues that it is here—at the moment of New Criticism's triumph—that the seeds of the profession's current malaise were sown. "These new methods entailed redefining criticism—formerly understood as the practice of judgment—as a method of interpretation. In this way, the profession of criticism became a discipline" (xi). Guillory repeats this bizarre claim—which constitutes his major historical argument—across his book. "Precisely because criticism had to establish its disciplinary credentials, it suppressed judgment in favor of its 'formal discourse' as a technique of interpretation" (58).It is hard to imagine that anyone could read the work of the New Critics and conclude that this work had "suppressed judgment." Joseph North, in his recent study, exemplifies a more common understanding when he takes the New Critics to task for vastly overemphasizing judgment. But, as we shall see, the claim that the sacrifice of judgment was necessary for literary criticism to become a discipline is crucial for Guillory's vision of the field. This argument projects the destructive tendencies that emerged in the criticism of Guillory's own generation back into the origins of the discipline itself. But before exploring more carefully the motives that led Guillory to install a wholly mistaken claim about midcentury criticism at the heart of his book, it's worth lingering a bit further over several aspects of this claim's weirdness.The first is the absence of any support for the claim. In a typical moment, Guillory turns to E. D. Hirsch for evidence for this supposed abandonment of judgment, quoting Hirsch's reference to the "general acceptance of the doctrine that description and evaluation are inseparable" (59). But to fuse two terms is not, as Guillory apparently believes, to "suppress" one of them. Hirsch correctly credits the New Criticism with the invention of a method that combines evaluation and description, a method commonly known as "close reading."The evaluative dimension of close reading is well known. Frances Ferguson (1995: 157), for example, writes that New Critical close reading is "objective not because it claimed to produce impartial accounts of what poems really meant, but because it identified the literary work's existence with the evaluation of it." We are animated, in approaching the work, by a working hypothesis that it knows something, or can do something, that we can't and that most works can't. This close attention, characterized by a suspension of our tendency to project, creates a situation in which value is actually an optic, a means for revealing features and dimensions of a work. This is a very different vision of literary value than that implied by "taste" and is, of course, totally missed by a perspective such as Bourdieu's or Guillory's. This fusion of evaluation and interpretation extends beyond the New Critics to other influential voices at the midcentury moment when criticism displaced philology at the center of English departments. Northrop Frye, for example, in his "Polemical Introduction," describes the only fit materials for the interpretive practice he advocates as "masterpieces of literature" (Frye 2000: 15) and as "profound masterpieces" (19). Frye's archetypal criticism differs from the method of the New Critics, but hardly in regard to the inextricability of judgment from interpretation.One therefore might expect Guillory to offer an argument for why the fusion of evaluation and criticism amounts to the "suppression" of judgment. But he consistently treats fusion and elimination as if they were the same thing, without evidence or explanation. He writes, for example, that the midcentury critics "fused interpretation with judgment" (53). At another point, he writes that "aesthetic judgment has been relegated to a tacit assumption of scholarship" (377). It is among the many surprises of Professing Criticism that, almost without fail, Guillory will cite, in support of his argument, a work that, properly considered, undermines it. So it is with his idea that the "tacit" nature of judgment in literary criticism amounts to "abandoning the effort to formalize aesthetic judgment" (59). In his discussion of literary pedagogy, Guillory cites the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, whose entire career was devoted to patiently showing how the "tacit dimension," the implicit or unformalizable aspect of a pedagogical or research practice, was absolutely central and indispensable to that practice (157). From Polanyi's perspective, the "tacit" quality of judgment in midcentury criticism made it the foundation of the entire method.In fact, the only way to make sense of Guillory's claim that critics "abandoned" judgment at the moment of criticism's formation as an academic discipline is by adopting an extremely reduced image of judgment as the simple communication of an explicit "good/bad" verdict on the object. We get an intimation of the depths of Guillory's own professional deformation when we discover that his discussion of the evaluation of academic scholarship contains the book's sole robust image of judgment. He writes, when discussing how tenure files should be evaluated, that judgment isn't simply a matter of "thumbs up or thumbs down." Rather, "answerability, or more generally still, responsibility, is built into the discursive scenario of evaluation as its condition of possibility" (281–82).We can have some sympathy for the difficulty Guillory has faced as an administrator trying to make value claims for literary scholarship in the absence of a capacity to describe the value of literature. But I will confine myself to pointing out that the "answerability" Guillory finds in literary scholarship is, as more honest and careful students of the New Criticism have shown, exactly what that critical method entailed. Close reading subjects judgment to the test of a careful description of the literary object—in Ferguson's words, it "objectifies" judgment, removing it from the plane of the private and subjective.The great irony here is that Guillory understands himself to be advocating for a return to judgment, in his calls "to formalize aesthetic judgment" early in the book and in his section on aesthetic evaluation in the book's conclusion. But his history implies a reductive view of what judgment of literature looks like—a "thumbs up, thumbs down" verdict—that leaves it a complete mystery as to how judgment might ever be made compatible with disciplinary rigor. But in fact there's nothing mysterious about it. Formalized aesthetic judgment looks exactly like the method of close reading developed in the mid-twentieth century. The mystery is entirely an artifact of Guillory's distorted history. A better history might raise productive questions about how to overcome the limitations of the New Critical method—its reliance on an overly circumscribed canon, its often narrow criteria. But Guillory's ostensible advocacy of a return to judgment amounts to a mystification that pits disciplinary rigor against the social purpose embodied in evaluation—enacting the very deformation his book claims to critique.The fact that Guillory can reproduce, in nearly identical terms, the New Criticism's complex fusion of judgment and interpretation when discussing the evaluation of literary scholarship isn't simply weird. Rather, it suggests that the reductive sense of judgment in the book isn't a private matter at all but a condition of the professional world in which Guillory rose to distinction.The tension between criticism's social aims and academic methods—baked in, according to Guillory's history, at the moment of disciplinary formation—leads to the field's current crisis. The problem, according to Guillory, is that academic literary critics claim for their methods "socially transformative effects," yet these methods are anchored to a media form—literature—that is no longer culturally central (xiii). As the object of study grows ever more insignificant, critics compensate by "amplifying" their political aims, generating a full-blown "crisis of legitimation" (xiii).This diagnosis is wrong, but it will help to break it down into its component parts to see why.First, consider that Guillory makes this claim about the weakness and impotence of the humanities' social and political interventions at the very moment when those interventions have attained a level of social dissemination and ubiquity unimaginable even fifteen years ago. The critical practice Eve Sedgwick termed "paranoid reading" has become mainstream society's default approach to cultural commentary, while formerly esoteric critical vocabularies regarding race, gender, colonialism, cultural appropriation, and sexuality have infiltrated venues from the New York Times to daytime TV to Twitter to Fox News.The meaning of this transformation of humanities' discourse—this recent attainment of a level of cultural power far outstripping even the most "amplified" hopes of humanists—continues to be hotly debated and has even become a focus of the war between America's two major political parties. If this book had been published fifteen years ago, Guillory's picture of the political and social marginality of humanities-originating discourse would be understandable, even if his dismissal of the tendency of that discourse to "aspire to the form of prophecy" would today read as unintended irony (73). But Professing Criticism was published in 2022, when formerly esoteric humanities terminology was literally front-page news. This suggests, to put it mildly, a lacuna in Guillory's understanding of the relation of academic criticism to political power.2The closest he comes to acknowledging the humanities' "socially transformative effects" comes in a discussion of teaching. While he neglects the question of the new visibility of humanities' scholarly discourse, his remarks about pedagogy are nevertheless instructive. Guillory suggests that teaching in the humanities has had "a significant impact on political attitudes in the demographic of the 'college educated.' " But he goes on to say that "the success of this attitudinal shift, especially in the field of speech, does not mean that the college educated fully understand the structural bases of social injustice or see clearly what must be done politically to transform these structures." "The professional profile" created by college teaching "coexists with the reproduction of systemic modes of oppression, because this profile is not by itself a solution to them" (74).If at some points in Professing Criticism, Guillory dismisses academic critics' view of their practice as "socially transformative," here he argues that these practices are indeed transformative, but this transformation is malign or misguided. Characteristically, there is no development of this line of thought and no resolution of the contradictions of his political claims. We never learn whether he thinks the basic problem is that critics have no political effect or that the problem is that they have the wrong political effect.His language, though ambiguous, points to a possible affinity with the perspective of academics like Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, who have sharply criticized the humanities' reigning political ethos. But for Michaels and Reed, the identity-focused, attitudinal politics of academic criticism doesn't simply "coexist" with class inequality but is an important means by which that inequality is reproduced, by siphoning off revolutionary energies into the safe—for capitalism —terrain of speech codes, correct attitudes, and the politics of recognition.It's impossible to tell if Guillory believes something like this and is just being cautious or timid, or if he endorses the identitarian emphases of the reigning critical orthodoxy and just thinks that college teaching communicates these emphases in a manner unlikely to lead to systematic change. For now, I want to note that Guillory is correct that the abandonment of the anticapitalist politics of judgment generated a different politics of academic criticism, even if he is wrong about when and why this abandonment happened and confused about the relevant causes and effects.We now turn to the other half of Guillory's diagnosis of the present crisis of academic criticism, concerning the diminished place of literature. His analysis of the status of literature rests on fundamental misconceptions and issues in a bizarre vision of the field's future. It is important to examine his claims at some length before proceeding to describe their defects.There are two problems, he argues, with literary critics' object of study. The first is that literature no longer occupies the central place in the culture that he believes it did in the past. "The greatest problem for teachers of literature today is the fact that literature is no longer, as it once was, the principal source of entertainment for those able to read. Nor is it the principal means of achieving cultural distinction of the sort that once motivated the European bourgeoisie" (379).The second problem with literary criticism's object, which exists in an unexplained tension with this first problem, is that academic literary criticism is cut off from "lay readers" and can't really relate to their concerns and practices. A successful discipline presumably connects its academic interest in its object of study to larger social aims. While Guillory's theorizing of disciplines is rather thin, primarily relying on sociological sources, with little or no reference to the rich research on disciplines generated by the philosophy of science and adjacent fields, a fuzzy picture of what a successful discipline looks like eventually emerges in his pages. The methods by which a field like physics explores the natural world are socially justified by the value of the knowledge thereby created and by the practical uses to which this knowledge can be put.Ideally, academic literary criticism should illuminate or instruct reading outside the academy. But, in Guillory's account, the focus of academic literary scholarship in producing esoteric interpretations of texts does not illuminate the practice of nonprofessional readers but develops in parallel to that practice. It is, of course, the supposed New Critical abandonment of judgment that is ultimately responsible for this, and once again Guillory projects the failure of his own generation back into the origin of the discipline while simultaneously claiming that this failure was somehow necessary.The discipline of criticism, in other words, had to cut itself off from the practice of teaching the lay reader both because of the demands of disciplinarity and because the pressure of "new media" drove ambitious literature and its interpreters into conflict with mass audiences. "The distinction between judgment and interpretation traces the line of demarcation between lay and professional reading" (329). Since "lay readers" are oriented to judgment—again, described in the reductive way he understands judgment throughout much of the book—and "professional readers" are oriented toward interpretation, literary criticism experiences a crisis of social legitimacy.This putatively neutral description of the present status of literature generates Guillory's prescription for curing criticism's ills, to which we will now turn, as we consider how he is wrong about the future.For Guillory, as we have seen, academic literary criticism is characterized by an unrealistic vision of its social effects, anchored in an unexamined dependence on its object of study. Therefore he argues that critics need to get a better sense of the object of study—literature—from which will proceed a more viable sense of their social role. Many critics, distracted by their inflated social ambitions, ambitions that represent a compensation for the marginality of their object of study, have migrated away from literature itself, undertaking broad historical and cultural analysis unmoored from their actual training."Literature needs to be recentered by the literary professoriate in order to reestablish its public claim to expertise." To fix the problems created by literary study's "suppression" of judgment, he proposes—more suppression of judgment. "I would stipulate that the recentering of literature does not entail the assertion of its superiority as a cultural or aesthetic form to any other cultural or aesthetic form" (80).But who claims that literature as such is a superior cultural form? The strong claim is that great works of literature are superior both to bad literature and to the majority of culture industry trash in various media. The proper objects of literary study are masterpieces from Paradise Lost to Invisible Man, which were never any society's main entertainment, and I don't know anyone—outside of Guillory's pages—who would claim they were.We might here note a similar issue with the other reason Guillory adduces for literature's new social marginality, that it is no longer "the principal means of achieving cultural distinction of the sort that once motivated the European bourgeoisie" (379). But the only reason this would be a disabling problem for the profession's social aims would be if the sole audience for literature was rich people trying to impress each other with quotations from Alexander Pope.And yet Guillory himself admits that this is far from the case when he says that the prime believers in the value of great literature are the very lay readers he faults the profession for failing to reach. "Ironically the public continues to express a high regard for literature" (69). "Lay reading often retains a certain residually pious orientation to great works of literature" (324). Here, in some of the most illuminating moments in Professing Criticism, Guillory abandons his neutral tone and displays his normative sense that the persistence of the regard for great literature is anachronistic and mistaken. He suggests that the capacity of ordinary people to believe that great literature is better than the products of the culture industry is an atavism, and one that the classrooms of Guillory and his distinguished colleagues should correct.Guillory's call to "recenter" literature in academic criticism and to find a rationale for the discipline in the aesthetic qualities of literature depends on avoiding any invidious comparison between great literature and culture industry dreck. He writes: "In my view, there is no interest in comparing works like Middlemarch or Beloved with a television sitcom or a thriller purchased in an airport bookstore. This is not because the latter forms are 'bad' but because they belong to a different locus of production and consumption" (378).Here one would really like a fuller explanation. One wants to ask Guillory: What happened to make the old idea—shared by critics from Arnold to Adorno—that capitalist control of culture produces a degradation that it is the work of the critic to resist? Has the capitalist control of mass culture collapsed? Has the subjection of cultural production to the profit motive disappeared? Has the deformation of cultural consumption by the degraded work conditions of capitalism been remedied? Or has capitalist culture changed in such a way as to become enriching, life-enhancing, freeing? And if it did, when and how?Has the culture industry finally lost—in the age of TikTok and streaming—its degraded and degrading qualities, such that now it deserves to be seen as not worse than great art but just different? Or has something else happened—something that renders the corruption of the culture industry invisible as a matter of professionalism to professors like John Guillory?Perhaps my greatest regret about Guillory's book is that it doesn't in the end show us what we'd really like to know: the complex and winding road of rationalization and justification, of professional calculation and careerist ambition that led the discipline to a place where the most basic social aim of modern literary instruction—to enable people to access concrete alternatives to the values of the market—cannot even be imagined. Suffice it to say that the fatal separation of interpretation and judgment—which Guillory projects back into the discipline's modern origins—was the work of his generation of scholars in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. His generation was characterized by an intense commitment to a meritocratic professionalism that defined itself in opposition to literary judgment—to the commitment to the value of great literature. Mary Poovey, Bruce Robbins, Lauren Berlant, and so on—for all their very real differences, they shared this commitment, and it had exactly the deforming effects that Guillory projects onto the previous generations of academic literary critics. In the most interesting cases, the abandonment of artistic value was curiously compensated for in aspects of the critics' work—such that one got the sense sometimes that they sought to rival literary works.Looked at from the perspective of criticism's social purpose, some of the enthusiasms of that era—from the critique of the "aesthetic ideology" to the turn to sociological demystification, exemplified by Guillory's own move from his early literary critical work to Cultural Capital—seem like a classic instance of what economists call "perverse incentives," in which individuals score points for their career at the expense of the enterprise's larger social function. While the wrongheadedness of literary sociology has been the subject of intense critique in recent years, we still lack a full account of the political, institutional, and intellectual environment that gave rise to the suppression of judgment in literary studies (see, for example, n+1 2023; Da 2019). What Professing Criticism gives us, instead of this absorbing and tragic tale, is its sorry conclusion.The tragedy is that, once they accepted the capitalist dogma of the equality of consumer preferences, Guillory's generation found that the promised reward—a high position for literary criticism in the education of the capitalist elite—has disappeared. Ironically, the price of acquiescence to neoliberal culture turned out to be the fatal undermining of the discipline's rationale. And once the migration of the new neoliberal-friendly humanities discourse from humanities classrooms to the "new media" happened, there was little reason for students or anyone else to continue to tune in.If the value of great literature versus culture industry trash can no longer be defended by academic literary critics, there is really no reason—other than a purely antiquarian one—for the academic discipline of literary criticism. Guillory's rousing call for "a new theoretical account of literature's place in the system of media" doesn't appear to rouse even himself, and the book peters out in vague admonitions to pay attention to how detached the field is from the public (81). If Guillory's right, and professors can't give students a reason to study Shakespeare or Gwendolyn Brooks instead of watching "a television sitcom," then the whole shop should be folded into minor branches of history and communication, with the remainder going to composition.But Guillory's wrong. The strong arguments and evidence he needs—about the formation of the discipline, about the changed relation between great literature and the culture industry—are missing from his book, for the good reason that they don't exist.