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arguments for each of these approaches, and into the ways by which
they have been integrated into the apparatus of college teaching.
Anyone familiar with university English courses, as I have been for
many years, will recognize the succession of theories and practices
described by Graff that has marked the transformation of the univer–
sities from upperclass institutions guarding moral and civic values
and preserving the classics to democratic ones teaching the for–
malizations of dissent in higher learning today.
Graffs book is thick with detail. He recounts the arguments for
all the theories behind the different practices in the teaching of lit–
erature. In this respect,
Professing Literature
is more than a study of
the academic profession; it is a comprehensive and subtle history of
literary theories and criticism. It is acute and informative in its
discussion of the New Humanists, the New Critics, the Marxists ,
the deconstructionists, and the feminists. In each case, he tries to
present as fairly as possible their merits as well as their shortcom–
ings. But in view of his earlier criticism of the deconstructionists and
the Marxists, he appears to be almost too neutral in his treatment of
them in this book, as though he were swayed by the tolerance of dif–
ferences in the academy.
It
is as if the inadequacies of various trendy
movements had nothing to do with the right to teach them.
But, however valuable it is to know the history of what Graff
calls professing literature, this is not enough to come to grips with
the basic problems of teaching and learning, particularly of liter–
ature. We still have no widely accepted answer to the question of
what the student should learn and the teacher should teach. Educa–
tors mouth platitudes about the acquisition of knowledge by the
students and the imparting of this knowledge by their professors .
But the fact is that mass education has created a body of students
who are either not interested in or capable of absorbing much of the
esoteric and professionalized ideas that are being dispensed in the
name of higher learning. In addition, a good part of the faculty in
colleges around the country has become an academic bureaucracy,
with its own theories, its own language, its own interests. Take, for
example, the fashionable spread of deconstruction in literary theory,
which, aside from its questionable assumptions, has become the cat–
echism of a network of professors who write for each other, read each
other, promote each other, and share an esoteric jargon.
It
is hard to
see how the teaching of deconstructionist ideas and methods has
much to do with the raw students' needs to acquaint themselves with
the classics of Western literature and literary criticism. As for more
