ABSTRACT
In Professing Literature, Gerald Graff proposes to reintroduce the American literary academy of the present day to its origins. Professing Literature thus seeks to engage with the current sense of crisis and disciplinary fragmentation by presenting a literary academy in a selfexamining mood with a historical picture of itself; the resulting portrait places the disquiet of the present in perspective, for it takes the form of a narrative plotted along the lines of a pervasive sense of disciplinary fragmentation. In many ways, Professor Graff’s project echoes Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism (1983), which presented a history of literary studies in Britain designed to tone down the claims of the ‘crisis in criticism’ school. A detailed examination of the historical record, Baldick argued, showed that the crisis in literary studies was not a peculiar condition of the present; rather, the institution had been in a permanent state of embattlement and disagreement. Graff’s strategy is similar: in the role of historian, he breaks up apparent continuities, and establishes patterns of identity where difference was previously thought to exist. While New Criticism has now reconciled its differences with humanism, in Graff’s study New Criticism emerges as the historical ally of deconstruction, in so far as both, at dispersed historical moments, have been taken to be asocial and anti-humanistic. Still, while Professing Literature presents an arresting thesis, the postures that Graff adopts in the role of historian seem to me to be problematic. I shall state what I mean by this a little later, but I should say at once that the problem is not peculiar to Graff; rather, it stems from ‘history’ as a mode of discourse.
