Professing Literature
An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Updated with a new preface by the author that addresses many of the provocative arguments raised by its initial publication, Professing Literature remains an essential history of literary pedagogy and a critical classic.
“Graff’s history. . . is a pathbreaking investigation showing how our institutions shape literary thought and proposing how they might be changed.”— The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
“Graff’s history. . . is a pathbreaking investigation showing how our institutions shape literary thought and proposing how they might be changed.”— The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
“Both E. D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom share . . . a nostalgia for a not very closely examined past in which things were better. Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature is extremely important, partly because it tells us a good deal about the realities of this supposedly better time. . . . Graff’s book is more consequential than Bloom’s because it addresses the pedagogical questions and situates them in a fascinating narrative of how literature has actually been taught in this country for the past century and a half.”—Robert Scholes, College English
“Among the most perceptive observers of modern literary criticism. . . . [Graff] has undertaken a search for those institutional pressures and inertias which have generated the complex pattern of hostilities now entrenched between professors of literature. . . . One of the many benefits of a historical view such as Graff’s is that it discovers some unsettling ironies behind the slogans and banners of today’s battleground.”--Times Literary Supplement
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Humanist Myth
LITERATURE IN THE OLD COLLEGE: 1828-1876
2 The Classical College
3 Oratorical Culture and the Teaching of English
4 The Investigators (1): The New University
5 The Investigators (2): The Origins of Literature Departments
6 The Generalist Opposition
7 Crisis at the Outset: 1890-1915
SCHOLARS VERSUS CRITICS:1915-1930
8 Scholars versus Critics: 1915-1930
9 Groping for a Principle of Order: 1930-1950
10 General Education and the Pedagogy of Criticism: 1930-1950
SCHOLARS VERSUS CRITICS: 1940-1965
11 History versus Criticism: 1940-1960
12 Modern Literature in the University: 1940-1960
13 The Promise of American Literature Studies
14 Rags to Riches to Routine
PROBLEMS OF THEORY: 1965-
15 Tradition versus Theory
Notes
Index
Education: Higher Education
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
