Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition - Softcover

Graff, Gerald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226305597 ISBN 13: 9780226305592

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2007

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author:

Gerald Graff is professor of English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been elected to serve as the President of the Modern Language Association in 2008.

Review:

"Both E. D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom share...a nostalgia for a not very closely examined past in which things were better. Gerald Graff's Professing Literature is extremely important, partly because it tells us a good deal about the realities of this supposedly better time....Graff's book is more consequential than Bloom's because it addresses the pedagogical questions and situates them in a fascinating narrative of how literature has actually been taught in this country for the past century and a half." - Robert Scholes, College English "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"

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0226305597
• ISBN 13: 9780226305592
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 340