Everything You Always Wanted to Know About English Departments (But Were Too Overcommitted to Ask)

Knitting and Unknitting a Narrative

I’ll return to Guillory’s analyses of graduate education below (which include his belated response to those activists), but there is one more structural feature of the book I need to address before I discuss anything else: its thirteen essays do not follow a single thread of argument, offering instead a kind of palimpsestic overlap of closely related arguments. In his preface, Guillory argues that this structure is dictated by the unruly subject matter itself:

The chapters in this collection were composed initially in the hope of producing a sociologically informed history of literary study, a history that would proceed as a linear narrative. That plan ultimately proved impractical, largely because of my limitations as a scholar of English literature. The asymmetric relation between English and the modern foreign languages in the Anglo-American university makes the history of literary study very difficult to integrate into one narrative. For related reasons, the converging and diverging histories of British and American literary study are equally difficult to integrate. . . . If I have had to forgo the linearity of the monographic form, I have exchanged that tidiness for the possibility of studying close-up a number of developments in the discipline. . . . Some of these developments—such as the decline of rhetoric or the globalization of English—have unique contexts and timelines, which could only with multiple digressions have been integrated into a single longitudinal narrative. (ix–x)

Those challenges are real, which is why most people have not attempted a sociologically informed history of literary study. But what’s lost here, I think, is more than tidiness. Leaving aside for now that curious teaser about “the decline of rhetoric,” I’ll just note that the “collection” (it is telling that Guillory does not say “the chapters in this book”) requires a good deal of cross-referencing on the part of writer and reader alike. Sometimes that is a result of the internal overlap among arguments (especially with regard to the topics of vernacularization, professionalization, and disciplinarization), but sometimes it leaves gaps between potentially related lines of thought. For instance: Guillory’s astute observation, in his final chapter, that “the fortunes of any particular discipline depend to a certain degree upon the strength of self-definition” (345) seems to subtend a good deal of his argument in chapter 10, “Evaluating Scholarship in the Humanities”; that chapter, in turn, refers repeatedly back to a series of arguments in chapter 4 on “Monuments and Documents” in the humanities. One recurring tableau in those chapters is the scene of humanists trying to explain the work of their colleagues to skeptical scientists on university-wide tenure and promotion committees: hence the concern with disciplinary self-definition. Likewise, Guillory’s call for a “poetics of scholarship” in the chapter on evaluating scholarship, which to some extent reinvents the wheel Ernest Boyer created in Scholarship Reconsidered (1990) with the idea of “the scholarship of teaching,” has implications for the always-undervalued role of rhetoric and composition in English departments, but the following chapter, “Composition and the Demand for Writing,” is something of an orphan in the volume, and does not pick up on the previous chapter’s poetics of scholarship. And chapter 7, “The Location of Literature,” could probably have been located among the first three essays on the institution of criticism; while it makes sense as a lead-in to the following chapter, “The Contradictions of Global English,” it also illuminates much of what made literature available for organized study in the first place.

Indeed, there is a history of literary criticism here, kind of—but you have to piece it together from tantalizing glimpses. It begins, as it should, with the jettisoning of philology and literary history and the rise of the critics—who, Guillory correctly argues, established their idea of the discipline by throwing a lot of stuff overboard. Not only belles lettres, philology, and positivistic literary history, but also the relatively new forms of popular “genre” writing like detective fiction and science fiction (210) and, mirabile dictu, the nonfiction essay: “It is one of the great ironies of literary history that the essay, as a literary form, later fell out of the domain of canonical transmission. The essay form survives into the present, but for the most part as the signature genre of ‘belletrism,’ a form of ‘light’ literature” (178–79). (I would argue that it has surreptitiously reemerged over in the creative writing wing, disguised as “creative nonfiction,” but the point holds that we no longer spend a lot of time, as a profession, with Addison and Steele or Hazlitt or Carlyle.) And composition was consigned to the basement, many its practitioners relegated to the Adjunct Building with neither private offices nor professional wages, even though “this least prestigious of the English department’s tasks would nonetheless go on to secure the department’s future in the American university” (194).

“Delimiting the meaning of literature,” Guillory writes, “was a condition in the first place for constituting literature as a discipline” (204). This delimitation of the field of literature also managed, as Guillory shows, to disentangle our object of study from language in general: “The construction of the disciplinary object as the literary work of art finally disambiguated the relation between language and literature that had long perplexed a coherent conceptualization of the modern language disciplines’ object of study” (54). It is curious that this happened just around the time that the advent of modernist literature gave us exceptionally difficult textual material that only adepts could navigate, and it is still curiouser and curiouser that this development was crosscut by the fact that “the concept of literature entered into the system of the disciplines as the name not only of a disciplinary object but of a truth antithetical to the truth of science, deeply at odds with the tendency of modernity” (206). For that, of course, we have to thank F. R. Leavis in the United Kingdom and his fulminations against the modern “technologico-Benthamite world” and (once again) the Fugitives/ New Critics in the United States, this time for their agrarian revanchism.

But the really astonishing thing about this radical delimitation of “literature”—about which Raymond Williams wrote decades ago in Keywords, as Guillory does not fail to acknowledge—is not how successful it was, but how temporary. The disciplinary consensus underwriting the delimitation lasted a couple of decades, arguably culminating in 1957 in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, whose ambition to account for all the “modes” of literature4 was accurately appraised by Vivian Mercier in Commonweal: “Here is a book fundamental enough to be entitled Principia Critica” (618). But no sooner had the laws of physics been laid down for literary criticism than they were shattered by the relativistic and quantum phenomena cumulatively known as ‘Theory,’ arriving about a decade later and throwing the mechanics of the discipline into disarray. This disruption, the effects of which remain definitive of our own institutional condition of possibility,5 is remarked in a frustratingly scattershot way in Professing Criticism. There is a striking footnote reminding us that “the question of the relation between language and literature was reopened with the emergence of high theory” (54n23); a few pages later, le déluge:

High theory was itself an inaugural move in this direction, setting out from the hypothesis that the language artifact or “text” did not need to be a work of literature at all in order to exhibit “literariness.” This immensely generative conception, deriving from antecedents to theory extending back to Russian formalism and Prague structuralism, had unwitting consequences in the era of high theory. A door was opened leading beyond literature to all of culture, reduced to various species of textuality or literariness. (61)

Much later, in the chapter titled “Two Failed Disciplines,” there is a digressive footnote that can’t be integrated into a single longitudinal narrative but which acknowledges an important aspect of our intellectual history: “Relieved of the burden of upholding ‘English,’ comparative literature and foreign language departments were able to engage with European linguistics after the Second World War, which paved the way for the assimilation first of structuralist linguistics and eventually of ‘theory’ in all its forms” (188n32).

Let me put a bit more weight on this. The conception of literariness—which indeed goes all the way back to the origins of Russian formalism—was not only immensely generative, but also, in a strong sense, right. At the very least, it saved the discipline from the embarrassment of trying to explain what distinguished literary language from “ordinary” language, and at the very most, opened the field to the broadest possible conception of “language” (one that included, if you haven’t repressed this knowledge, the unconscious itself). At the end of “Two Failed Disciplines,” Guillory credits Roman Jakobson for positing “a profound contradiction in language between a ‘referential’ function and an antithetical ‘emotive’ or ‘poetic’ function” (197); at the outset of the following chapter, “The Location of Literature,” he makes the point again, this time in a hefty footnote that begins: “Another turn of the screw thus liberates literature from the literary work itself, and returns it to language, as the ground of a literary effect not restricted to literary genres” (202n6).6 There is also a passage in “The Location of Literature” that probably belongs in the chapter on professing criticism: “The successful establishment of scientific disciplines in the university of the later nineteenth century throws into relief the resistance of literature to disciplinarization, which I understand as an expression of its systemic eccentricity to the official curriculum, both the classical curriculum of the earlier nineteenth century and the scientific disciplines of the later” (205). I am reminded that thirty years ago John Mowitt wrote an entire book titled Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. If literary scholars and critics have been severely allergic to the idea of disciplinarity in recent decades (and we have been), it’s not entirely because we don’t like rules and regulations and we’re all in thrall to Foucault: it’s that “literature” (let alone “rhetoric”) is an exceptionally capacious thing, exceptionally hard to corral into a clearly defined academic subject. And if your understanding of “text” leads you also to study film, television, popular music and new media (with the attendant arguments with the media and communications department), you find yourself, at minimum, with some explaining to do when your colleagues in biochemistry and mechanical engineering ask you why people in your department are writing books about the work of Kendrick Lamar or the history of prefrontal lobotomy.7

Guillory Agonistes

It is not a major problem that Professing Criticism doesn’t have a single longitudinal narrative about literary study, especially since such a thing might not be available. But it will probably limit the book’s potential to supplant Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature as the go-to book with a through-line account of the field, even though, as Guillory points out in his opening pages, Graff himself has acknowledged (in a new preface to his book) that the thing we produce in literature courses is not literature but criticism (viii). A more serious problem is the book’s account—or lack of an account—of the relation between literature and new media (and what that means for contemporary scholarship and teaching), since Guillory rightly suggests that that relation will determine the role if not the very existence of English departments. Before I get there, though, I want to call attention to three of Guillory’s most contentious chapters: his updated report on the crisis of graduate education, his analysis of the challenges facing the evaluation of scholarship in the humanities, and his brief on the rise of global English, which unfortunately has echoes of Guillory’s argument that canon revision is a kind of displacement of the politics of demographic representation.

I’ll take the last of these first. The chapter “The Contradictions of Global English” names the primary contradiction accurately: “Literature occupies a smaller place among cultural forms, while at the same time literature in English has proliferated far beyond its accumulation in the nations of its earlier writers” (227). This much has been clear for decades now, and it remains a curious feature of English in America (as I remarked a quarter century ago in The Employment of English) that, to gauge by our curricular offerings, most of us seem not to have noticed. Guillory suggests that when that changes, he could “easily see the English major in the future breaking into two tracks across the spine of World War II” (230). The postwar track “would study literature in English written largely if not exclusively after the Second World War, with an orientation toward issues of social identity” (230). That equation of postwar literature with issues of social identity so skews the analysis that next thing we know, the global English curriculum is being presented as a matter of aligning world literature in English with the demographics of underrepresented students:

In my department, the urgency of curricular reform was also expressed in an idiom analogous to that of pastoral care, as in the notion that students need to “see themselves in the curriculum.” . . . For my colleagues, it is principally underserved or excluded minorities who want to “see themselves” in the canon, and curricular reform should proceed accordingly. But in addition to the fact that many students belong to “majority” categories of identity, the very fact of the diversity of minority students vexes the aim of constructing the curriculum in a mirror relation to demographics. Only contemporary literature has any chance of representing real-world diversity, with obvious implications for the distribution in the curriculum between older and contemporary works. (228–29)

It’s true for any number of reasons that it’s not helpful to construe curricular revision in this way. Leaving aside the number of students in majority categories of identity, there’s no way to match Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, Wole Soyinka, Michael Ondaatje, Anna Burns, and Arundhati Roy to any group of minority-category students in the United States.8 But it seems to me that this is the least productive way to think about the curriculum. In his preface, Guillory hearkens back to his argument from a generation ago: “The discipline and its institutional structures, especially the curriculum, were reimagined as surrogates for the social totality. The canon debate of the 1980s and ‘90s was the major consequence of this surrogational politics” (xii). The phrase “surrogational politics,” like the term “pastoral care” in the passage I quoted above, is bound to raise hackles, and rightly so. (I can’t help but sense a whiff of paternalism in “pastoral care.”) For the argument that canon revision in the ‘80s and ‘90s was a surrogate and belated form of desegregation (and therefore more easily achieved than social desegregation) was far less compelling, to me and to many observers, than the argument that an American literary archive lacking the work of (say) Frederick Douglass and Zora Neale Hurston was simply unjustifiable on intellectual grounds. Of course, the demographics were an issue: many of the excluded or understudied writers were Black, and they were excluded and understudied precisely on those grounds. But then, as now, there were very strong reasons for the expansion of the curriculum that were not referable to any student demographic.

As for the evaluation of scholarship: I’ve noted above Guillory’s correlation between the strength of a discipline’s self-definition and its protocols for evaluating scholarship in its field. Guillory’s argument about those protocols took me back to the mid-aughts—when he and I were serving on the MLA Task Force on the Evaluation of Scholarship (an experience that I have to assume informs his argument now, though he does not reference the report or his work on it) and when my dean at Penn State informed the English department that henceforth we would have to name the flagship journal(s) and presses in our field. These would then become “indicators” of merit in all annual reviews and tenure and promotion dossiers. We were given the impossible task, just to take one subfield, of deciding among American Literature, American Literary History, African American Literature, and Callaloo (to name a few). Our dean was a political scientist, and initially thought that we were dodging the assignment when we came back with a list of a couple dozen journals in various subfields.

Guillory focuses instead on the levels of review above those of the department, which are not quite empyrean but which allow us “to grasp the specificity of humanities scholarship in such a way as to cast some light on the trouble in which it perennially finds itself, as the poor relation among the disciplines, as the first to suffer when presses cut back on publication or libraries on acquisitions or administrations on budget lines” (281).9 But it is weird to hear these higher levels of review described like so: “I am noting that the end point of externalization in the evaluative process converges with the sense of an achieved objectivity in the process itself” (283). Later, Guillory claims that “the procedure of externalization . . . is misunderstood as an attempt to transcend bias” (286). Misunderstood by whom? This seems to me a misframing of what happens in those scenes of upper-level evaluation: it is not that “externalization” has anything to do with “the sense of an achieved objectivity” (again, whose sense? and whose achievement?). I would rather put it this way: as you move from the detailed evaluation of someone’s scholarship on Keats or queer intimacy or Kendrick Lamar or prefrontal lobotomy to college- and university-wide levels at which the evaluation takes the form of determining whether the scholarship has been published in an “indicator” press or journal (this is what Guillory means by “externalization”), you shift the decision-making basis from content to form. Guillory takes aim at Barry Sarchett’s argument that in a radically fragmented discipline skeptical of disciplinarity itself, such professionalist criteria are all we have to go by (291)—and it’s true, much is lost when the only thing you need to read about someone’s book is the name of the press on the bottom of the binding. Moreover, Guillory is right to argue that conflating scholarship with publication undervalues the talents of “mute inglorious Auerbachs” (284), many of whom are surely among our colleagues off the tenure track, the vast majority of whom are given no time or support for research. But Guillory does not acknowledge that reliance on formalist, professionalist criteria is a double-edged sword: one of the reasons feminist and queer work became so influential in our discipline in the ‘80s and ‘90s, despite entrenched opposition from some senior faculty, was that those senior faculty were effectively stymied by the fact that they couldn’t very well argue against the merits of work published by presses like Duke, Harvard, Minnesota, and Columbia. (Note to deans and everyone else: this is not an exhaustive list of “indicator” presses.) “Once a work is published,” Guillory writes, “it gains a limited immunity from subjective evaluation; it makes a stubborn claim to constitute accomplishment and therefore to merit reward, whether or not the work is ever read, whether or not it matters to anyone” (287). To which I have to say: this is quite true—and on balance, it’s a good thing, too.

Lastly, Guillory’s chapter on graduate education takes on board much of the work in “critical university studies” of the past quarter century; Leonard Cassuto’s work on graduate programs and Christopher Newfield’s on university funding are duly noted, and Guillory renews an old argument with Marc Bousquet, Cary Nelson, and Steven Watt. It was a coffee-spewing moment for me, however, to read Guillory’s account of his initial essays on the subject, published in 1996 and 2000, when “the realization that the job crisis was permanent was only slowly sinking in” (247). Well, I suppose that was true for some of us, but back when Nelson and I were still playing for the same team, we wrote about what we perceived as the permanent job crisis in 1994 (“Moral Base”). Hence our initial frustration with Guillory’s work: we thought it was a bit late to the game and offered a Goodyear-blimp-perspective of the field.

But to give Guillory his due today, he is right to argue that it is not clear why (to take one salient argument of the era) anyone thought that substituting the term “job system” for “job market” accomplished anything worth accomplishing.10 Guillory quotes a very unfortunate explanation of the term “job system” from Nelson and Watt: “The supply of candidates has been artificially increased and the demand for full-time employees artificially depressed” (253, citing Academic Keywords, 157). In other words, the idea is that the “market” is actually a function of administrative choices, not a naturally occurring phenomenon. “Such a notion,” Guillory replies:

implies that the relation between supply and demand in the labor market gravitates to a “natural” state of equilibrium; if there is a disequilibrium, it is no longer an economic matter but (as Nelson and Watt argue) “cultural and institutional” (157). Since when, however, has a disequilibrium of supply and demand ceased to be an economic problem? . . . The notion that there is a natural state of equilibrium between supply and demand in any market whatsoever is as mystified as the medieval notion of the “natural price” for a commodity. (253)

And yet even this sensible objection misses the larger point, namely, that all talk of supply and demand in the academic labor market ignores the fact that we now have two separate markets—one national, one local—corresponding to the two tiers (tenure-track and non-tenure-track) of the academic labor force. Guillory is right to argue that the second tier entails the deprofessionalization of the profession: “The ladder [i.e., tenure-line] faculty slips into a tacit relation of exploitation to the contingent corps. Often the adjunct or part-time sector of this corps is hired and fired without the collective participation of the tenure-line faculty, further derogating the disciplinary work that is essential to the mission of the humanities and of the university” (258). One could just as well say that the adjunct or part-time sector of this corps is hired and fired without the knowledge of the tenure-line faculty, few of whom involve themselves with such matters. Furthermore—and this is something about which almost no one has even tried to be honest—the second tier is composed of a mix of faculty only some of whom hold terminal degrees. Guillory correctly notes that “these terms make no distinction between MAs and PhDs, thus reducing the higher credential to the lower” (258), but he does not note that this arrangement is the source of unresolvable tension between MA-holders who insist (with reason) that their teaching is every bit as strong as their PhD-holding counterparts and PhD-holders who wonder (with reason) why they spent all those years studying for comprehensive exams and writing a dissertation if their salaries and ranks are identical to that of their colleagues who did not. The fact that this tension is unresolvable, surely, is why almost no one is being honest about it.11

The Shock of the New

I hope it is obvious by now that there is more than enough material in Professing Criticism to argue with, and that the book offers so much for consideration that argument is not only inevitable but potentially clarifying. But when it comes to defending and explaining contemporary work in the humanities, I have to conclude that we would need another book altogether. Guillory is explicit about why his book is not that book:

Understandably, scholars like to point to what is new in order to express a sense of the value of disciplinary work, but I argue that what is new in the discipline is built on very old foundations, which make possible what is new. I will not, for this reason, be concerned to discuss at any length the diverse tendencies or movements in literary study today, such as postcolonial studies, race and ethnicity studies, digital analysis, disability studies, animal studies, indigenous studies, ecocriticism, cognitive studies, evolutionary studies, new materialisms, book history, affect studies, or new formalisms. (347)

That’s a pretty good list. It seems a shame that it is a list of things not discussed here at any length, especially if you’re trying to explain the discipline to outsiders.

This refusal of the present might seem odd at first because Guillory’s chapter on the method wars of the past twenty-five years, which bears the tongue-in-cheek title of “Critique of Critical Criticism,” is so judicious—respectful, yet ultimately dismissive of the silliness known as “post-critique” in literary studies. Guillory is right that Bruno Latour’s infamous “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” “is curiously orthogonal to [Eve] Sedgwick’s argument [about paranoid and reparative reading] and to literary study as a whole,” and that this is a “problematic fact” (84). He is right that Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s call for surface reading is a “false start,” with a premise built on sand, explaining: “The assumption that [Fredric] Jameson’s version of theory has widely governed critical practice seems to me mistaken” (86). He is right to object to the assumption that “amateur readers—or ‘lay readers’—are supposed to be characterized . . . by love for what they read” (91). He is right to observe that in Rita Felski’s cartoonish version of academic reading, “the hermeneutics of suspicion devolves . . . into a caricature of the suspicious person” (96). And finally, he is right to point out that much of the current discourse about modes of reading (surface, deep, distant, close, suspicious, reparative, rebarbative, distracted, Neapolitan, and mixolydian) ignores a great deal of work in reception history and reader-response criticism. He even offers a shout out to Louise Rosenblatt, author of the “transactional” theory of reading whose work “had a great impact on primary and secondary schools, and . . . has been unfortunately neglected by the postsecondary professoriate” (99). This is entirely true of Rosenblatt’s reception, which suggests that perhaps one of the modes of reading going on in these debates is “not reading.”

And yet when we achieve a suborbital distance on the book as a whole, we can see a larger pattern at work. It can first be discerned in the prefatory discussion of “topicality,” by which Guillory means “the foregrounding of political thematics in teaching and scholarship, along with claims for the socially transformative effects of these thematics” (xii). Although Guillory concedes that “the aims of topicality are laudable” (xii) and that it has “energized the discipline” (xiii), he argues:

It has done so . . . by ignoring the altered historical condition of literature. At the same time that criticism has amplified its claim to socially transformative effects, the proliferation of new media has displaced literature itself from its historical position as the premier medium of entertainment and edification. This media condition is in my view a matter of existential concern, but as long as the professoriate evades the question of whether its object is, or will continue to be, literature, it has no incentive for thinking through the place of literature in the media system. (xiii)

This seems to me a grievous miscalculation of where we are. To begin with, it is really not news, as Guillory declares in his closing pages, that “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” (379). Surely this has been the case since the advent of television, which would mean that there is no one teaching today who has any memory of (or illusions about) the primacy of literature in the media system. More important, I would argue, is the possibility that “topicality,” far from ignoring the altered historical condition of literature, has acknowledged it if not in fact accelerated it. This is why your colleague down the hall is writing things like “Kendrick Lamar’s Damn!: A What’s Going On? for the BLM Moment.” The thing that introduced film, television, popular music and new media to literary studies might well be called “topicality”; indeed, some of it was brought to you courtesy of cultural studies.

The problem here goes well beyond Guillory’s claim that “topicality operates in the discipline as the expression of surrogate politics” (76).12 It first becomes clear in the chapter “Monuments and Documents,” which has the noble aim of providing a broadly intelligible rationale for what we do: “Humanities scholars have devoted too much effort to declaring the purpose or value of humanities study—the why—and too little to giving an account of what they study. It is my contention that a better description of what we study will yield a better understanding in the public sphere of why we study these objects” (107). What’s missing from the following account is something that’s missing from most “official” defenses of the humanities, including the 2013 report of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Heart of the Matter: there is no justification for new research in the humanities. The sciences have long since perfected their pitch, that of creating new knowledge, and they deliver on it; but when we humanists resort to the monuments-and-documents approach, as Guillory does, then we wind up with, at best, arguments that the humanities contain the record of human wisdom, and nobody produces “new wisdom.” It is old, if not ancient, by definition. (At worst, we wind up with the humanities as dessert, or as a niche concern full of bespoke and antique artifacts.)

“It is always possible,” Guillory writes, “to construct a new object of study, but only when the necessary documents survive that would support such a construction” (122). This claim is debatable on its face, inasmuch as it seems difficult to encompass or understand work on the Anthropocene epoch or animal studies or disability studies (among other things) as being dependent on the survival of documents. Another version of it appears in Guillory’s account of evaluating scholarship, in his argument about “the historicity of archival research, as the archive’s dusty corners yield to ever more light” (297): “Once brought to light,” he writes, “an archive ceases to be the object of discovery and can only be constructed as archive again by interpretation or reinterpretation or by the discovery of related archival materials that call for the revision of the already illumined (hence the trope of ‘new light’ in scholarship)” (297). A closely related false note is struck in the final chapter, “Ratio Studiorum,” in which the profession’s relatively recent interest in the work of Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish is construed as a wrinkle in time: “Such revisions necessarily introduce incoherence into the curriculum in that they represent the assertion of new selection biases in tension with the old. . . . To the extent that preservation makes possible canonical revision and thus produces incoherence, it is both a necessary component of literary study as a discipline and a link to the social externalities of the discipline that impinge upon it and create new selection biases for canonization” (369).

Let me be clear about why I weigh these passages in the scales and find them wanting. Working backwards: nothing good is achieved by construing Aphra Behn’s presence in a program of study as an example of “incoherence.” Canon revision is, as Guillory says, a necessary component of literary study, and there is no coherent (ahem) rationale for why a discipline in the humanities should not respond, in the course of its history, to social externalities. This is, in turn, how an archive can continue to be a continual object of discovery. Furthermore, there is no reason to predicate the emergence of new objects of study on the survival of allegedly necessary documents; sometimes the new shocks us by showing up unannounced and undocumented.

Guillory’s book opens with the urgent conviction that “literary study, in one form or another, is foundational for all education” (xvi) and closes with the warning that it is now possible to imagine “a future in which literary scholarship might be regarded as unnecessary, a luxury that can no longer be afforded.” “It is with full awareness of this hypothetical future,” Guillory continues, “that we must understand our relation to knowledge and explain this relation to ourselves and others” (387). To do that effectively at this late date, I submit, we need a more dynamic conception of our field that does not see “topicality” merely as a form of “surrogate politics.” Likewise, we need a more capacious account of our relation to new media, our ability to create new objects-without-surviving-documents, and our rediscovery and reinterpretation of the materials of the dusty archives. Which is to say, we still need more new research in the humanities. If I were writing about that need, my argument would probably end something like this: contemporary research in criticism and theory is building on the work of the last three or four decades, work which followed from the turn to textuality and language-in-general and away from the delimitations of “literature.” The result has been to open new avenues of inquiry into the full range of human expression and variation as well as unprecedented and radically interdisciplinary inquiries into the relations between humans and the nonhuman worlds, from bacteria and lichens to birds and bees to plastic and the polar ice caps. There is, for instance, an entire branch of the humanities whose motto might well be Lynn Margulis was right about interspecies symbiosis.13 What I would want to do, in formulating the heart of the matter in this way, is to try to speak at once about how research in the humanities understands our human cultural heritage and about how research in the humanities imagines our present and future interactions with each other and with the biosphere. And, like Guillory, I would want to speak about “cultural heritage” without defaulting back into nationalist or ethnocentric conceptions of culture, appealing instead to our collective—our global—need to understand our multiple heritages and trajectories as humans in terms of intraspecies diversity in all its manifestations, and in terms of our various and often vexed relations with the nonhuman world. That would seem to me a plausible way to conclude an assessment of the function of criticism at the present time.

Michael Bérubé is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Penn State University and the author, most recently, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom with Jennifer Ruth (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).