Professing Literature

An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Gerald Graff

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780226305592
• eBook ISBN: 9780226305257
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Widely considered the standard history of the profession of literary studies, Professing Literature unearths the long-forgotten ideas and debates that created the literature department as we know it today. In a readable and often-amusing narrative, Gerald Graff shows that the heated conflicts of our recent culture wars echo—and often recycle—controversies over how literature should be taught that began more than a century ago.

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

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The Humanist Myth
• Literature in the Old College: 1828–1876
• The Early Professional Era: 1875–1915
• Scholars Versus Critics: 1915–1950
• Scholars Versus Critics: 1940–1965
• Problems of Theory: 1965–
• Notes
• Index