Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

340 Pages·2007·16.28 MB·English

by  Gerald Graff

Professing L ite ra tur e

GERALD GRAFF
Professing Literature
An Institutional History
Twentieth Anniversary Edition
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
0 1987,2007 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2007
Printed in the United States of America
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 1 2 3 4 5 6
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30559-2 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-30559-7 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Graff, Gerald.
Professing literature : an institutional history / Gerald Graff. -
Twentieth anniversary ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30559-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-30559-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Literature-
Study and teaching (Higher)-United States-History.
2. Criticism-United States-History. I. Title.
PN70.G7 2007
801’.9509734c22
2007010651
8 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI 239.48-1992.
Cont ents
Preface Twenty Years Later vii
Acknowledgments xxiii
I Introduction: The Humanist Myth i
LITERATURINE THE OLDC OLLEGE1: 828-1876
2 The Classical College i9
3 Oratorical Culture and the Teaching of English 36
THEE ARLYP ROFESSIONAELR A: 1875-1915
4 The Investigators (I): The New University 55
5 The Investigators (2):T he Origins of Literature
Departments 65
6 The Generalist Opposition 81
7 Crisis at the Outset: 189-1915 98
SCHOLARVSE RSUS CRITICS:1 915-1950
8 Scholars versus Critics: 1915-1930 121
9 Groping for a Principle of Order: 1930-1950 145
10 General Education and the Pedagogy of Criticism:
193-19 50 I 62
SCHOLARS VERSUS CRITICS: 194-1965
11 History versus Criticism: 1940-1960 183
12 Modern Literature in the University: 194-1960 195
13 The Promise of American Literature Studies 209
14 Rags to Riches to Routine 226
PROBLEMOSF THEORY1:9 65-
15 Tradition versus Theory 24 7
Notes 263
Index 305
V

Preface Twenty Years Later
One of the challenges for me in writing Professing Literature: An In-
stitutional History was to keep the argument from overwhelming the
history. I wanted my story of the emergence of professional academic
literary study in America to be useful to readers who might disagree
with my polemic on how the institution went wrong and how to set
it right. And I wanted a book that would have a shelf-life after the
controversies that shaped its writing had subsided.
Others will judge how well I succeeded, but Professing Literature
is clearly history told from a point of view, an effort to change the in-
stitution it describes. Not surprisingly, many of the book’s commen-
tators have focused on my argument that the controversies that have
roiled the waters of academic literary studies have possessed an over-
looked and untapped pedagogical potential. As I frequently complain,
the controversies that have divided literary academics have been
largely hidden from undergraduates rather than made part of the ob-
ject of study. The assumption has been that students should be ex-
posed to the results of the disagreements between their instructors-
results presumably representing settled knowledge-but not to the
debates that produced these results, which are felt to be worthy of in-
terest only to specialists. The curriculum, it is thought, should repre-
sent the enduring masterpieces and truths that are left standing after
ephemeral turf wars and arcane controversies have fallen away. It is
also thought that the heat and acrimony of controversy are threats to
intellectual community and curricular coherence and a distraction
from students’ primary experience of literature. I challenge all these
views, arguing that the effect of representing literary studies as if they
were above controversy has been to diminish intellectual community
and coherence and to leave many students clueless.
This diagnosis leads me to the conclusion that the best hope of
achieving coherence in the literature curriculum is to make use of
these controversies themselves (at least the most important ones) as a
vii
...
Vlll PREFACET WENTYYE ARSL ATER
new kind of organizing principle-in short, in the motto that emerged
in my subsequent work, “Teach the conflicts.” Educators have always
assumed that achieving coherence in the curriculum requires substan-
tive agreement; I argue that sharply focused disagreement can serve as
well or even better.
PATTERNEDI SOLATION
The liberal arts colleges that dominated American higher education
before the rise of the first departmentalized research universities en-
joyed a high degree of consensus, made possible only because the vast
majority of Americans were excluded from higher education. The co-
herence of the old college curriculum reflected a consensus that Greek,
Latin, Christianity, and respectable upper-class social values were the
foundations of good education. The new research universities that
arose after the Civil War were more democratically open to the citi-
zenry than the old liberal arts colleges had been, more receptive to the
secular pursuit of truth, and therefore more diverse in the ideas and
beliefs they represented. But this new diversity posed a new kind of
problem: which of the now numerous contending groups would speak
for the university itself? The new university dealt with this problem by
evolving a structure of departments whose separation from each
other-managed by a new cadre of academic administrators-guar-
anteed a level of peace and quiet.
Here was the emergence of what I call the “field-coverage’’ model
of academic organization. Each department was composed of a set of
subfields that were to be “covered,” first by faculty members trained
in the newly established system of graduate education, then by stu-
dents taking courses. As I suggest, the advantage of the field-coverage
model “was to make the [English] department and the college cur-
riculum virtually self-regulating.”
By assigning each instructor a commonly understood role-to cover a pre-
defined period or field-the principle created a system in which the job of
instruction could proceed as if on automatic pilot, without the need for in-
structors to debate aims and methods. (7)
A related advantage of field-coverage was to give the department
“enormous flexibility in assimilating new ideas, subjects, and meth-
ods” (7), especially those that might otherwise pose controversial
challenges to entrenched thinking.
Thus whenever a threatening innovation arose-positivistic “schol-
ars” who challenged the methods and assumptions of journalistic
“generalists”; academic “critics” (the New Critics), who challenged
Preface Twenty Years Later ix
both the scholars and the journalistic critics; eventually feminists,
post-structuralists, new historicists, queer theorists, and other insur-
gents who challenged both the New Critics and the traditional schol-
ars-the newcomers could be absorbed into the department by simply
being added to the established array of fields. Though ugly flare-ups
might occur in the pages of scholarly books and journals and at de-
partment meetings, the disconnection of the department and the cur-
riculum screened warring factions from each other and kept their
clashes largely out of the view of students. In a pluralistic spirit of live
and let live, traditionalists and young Turks could pursue their in-
compatible projects in the privacy of their courses instead of con-
fronting their differences out in the open.
But a result of this “patterned isolation,” in Laurence Veysey’s
telling phrase (60)w~a s to render the new university’s curriculum
notoriously incoherent. Specialization generally gets the blame for
curricular incoherence, but the more serious culprit in my view is an
entity we love to romanticize-the course. By configuring the curricu-
lum as a set of courses taught by solo instructors not in communica-
tion with one another, the field-coverage model took a set of con-
nected conversations and cut them into disconnected fragments. Thus
a literary culture that insiders-literary journalists, literate readers,
and professional academics-understood as a connected conversation
was divided into courses whose implicit conversational relationship to
each other was lost on most undergraduates. As those students went
from course to course, the coherence of the conversation to which
they were exposed tended to be intuited only by the high-achieving
few-often if not always economically privileged-that had prior ex-
perience from family or church in entering intellectual discussions.
As the impenetrability of the intellectual culture of the university
trickled down the school system, secondary and elementary schools
were left unsure how to prepare their students to get into college or to
succeed if they got there. The controversial recent report to Secretary
of Education Margaret Spellings, A Test of Leadership: Charting the
Future of US. Higher Education, is dead right in at least one claim:
that higher education has done little to address the “poor alignment
between high school and colleges” that often results in “substandard
high school preparation” for college. Trickle-down obfuscation from
the college curriculum has thus contributed to the much-discussed
“achievement gap” in American schools between children of the rich
and poor.
If making intellectual culture coherent and intelligible requires
foregrounding points of controversy, as I believe it does, the college