Professing Literature: An Institutional History

by Gerald Graff

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226306046
• ISBN13: 9780226306049
• Release Date: February 1989
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Useful for PhD Student

This book was a set text on a PhD course and it was interesting and useful, particularly for anyone who is looking to enter higher ed as a lectureer/professor.

Clear, concise, comprehensive

This detailed history of the rise of English departments in the U. S. is lucid, cogently argued, and replete with quotes from primary sources. By detailing the arguments over how (and, in the very beginning, whether) English should be taught, from the pre-English department days of the early nineteenth century into the 1960s, Graff takes the reader decade by decade through the controversies of the period, showing how theory is often mitigated by practice and how we have uncritically adopted "the habit of thinking of institutions as if they were unmediated projections of the values, methods, and ideologies of major individuals and movements." Graff would argue that though ideological debates help shape the institution, the process of institutionalization also reshapes ideologies.For the reader interested in current developments in literary theory, this should prove an invaluable sourcebook.