BOOKS
EDUCATING THE EDUCATORS
PROFESSING LITERATURE: AN INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY.
By
Gerald Graff.
The University of Chicago Press. $24.95.
Education has been the object of endless discussion by
professional educators, teachers, students, politicians, and pressure
groups. (The major-and perennial-questions have concerned the
general purpose of a college education, the relation of faculty to stu–
dents, the curriculum, and the proper methods of teaching.) The
teaching of literature as a subordinate question also has received at–
tention by teachers, literary critics, and professional organizations,
such as the Modern Language Association .
To my knowledge, nobody has come up with the right answers.
In fact, the discussions and debates have usually been full of moral
and political pieties, professional biases, vested interests, and an al–
most systematic evasion of the more touchy issues. Even Secretary of
Education William Bennett, who is surely correct in faulting higher
education for watering down its curriculum, goes off into time-worn
homilies about instilling the proper values in students, without con–
sidering the political pressures on universities and the source of the
decline of education in American society. Here and there, we hear
vague references to society as a whole, but we do not like to admit
either that the failings of colleges reflect the ethos of the
~ountry,
or
that in trying to establish their independence they breed a profes–
sional class that pursues its own insulated life.
These observations are occasioned by Gerald Graffs new book,
Professing Literature: An Institutional History.
Graff has written a very
thorough history, and, except for a few instances, mostly in dealing
with the contemporary scene, he has met the issues head on. He
takes us through the successive stages of educational theory and
practice, particularly in the field ofliterary studies: from the earliest
conceptions of a university as a place where the classics and rhetoric
were taught, and religion emphasized; the sway of the genteel tradi–
tion; the influx of Germanic research methods; the early humanist
and the primitive historical approach; the textual exegeses in the era
of New Criticism; up to the current disarray of textual study, his–
toricism, deconstruction, feminist theories, black esthetic, and old–
fashioned scholarship. Graff also has judiciously gon(' into the
