Reader Scott Newstok called my attention to this very interesting LRB review essay of John Guillory's latest attempt to look at the history and organization of literary studies as a field. A brief excerpt:
For Guillory, the pivotal development in the whole story was the arrival of ‘criticism’ as the dominant approach in the 1920s and 1930s, whether in the form of I.A. Richards’s ‘practical criticism’ in the UK or the New Critics’ ‘close reading’ in the US. This is when, in his view, literary studies became a discipline. But the attempt to turn criticism into a regulated and self-replicating profession generated all kinds of tensions, and Guillory urges that many of the issues agitating the field in recent decades are best seen as a working out of these tensions. For example, ‘criticism’ never quite shook off the aspiration to be in some way the criticism of society, not just literature, saddling the activity with exaggerated ambitions still evident today. At the same time, the logic of professionalism required a form of specialisation, a process carried further in the pressures towards intradisciplinary specialisation, which for the past 150 years has tended to take the form of expertise in the literature of a particular period. Even where the most ambitious conception of the discipline retains some overarching claim to underwrite the criticism of society, the cross-grained pressures of professionalisation demand ever greater subdivision: not to specialise is to risk one’s professional status by reverting to being an ‘amateur’.
A similar story might be told about academic philosophy in America one suspects, with the pivotal moment being the logical positivist invasion and takeover of America after WWII. Thought on Guillory's analysis (or Collini's review) from those more knowledgeable about literary studies welcome (as well as thoughts about the relevance to philosophy).
