Professing the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

INTENSE scrutiny of professional practice is becom ing a recognized activity various scholarly fields. The textual politics, institutional histories, and affiliative net works of academic enterprise general and liter ary study particular are beginning to be explored by practitioners as closely, if not as frequently, as traditional areas of inquiry. This paper introduces a large, long-term project on professional practice of eighteenth-century studies America from 1925 to 1975. The project seeks to contribute not only to study of period spe cialty but also to that emerging scholarly activity known as professionalism. Although no book-length study of professional practice of any period specialty British or American literature has yet been published, this project can claim kinship with recent work many fields. For instance, it traces its theoretical orientation to Kuhn's shared paradigms, Foucault's discursive formations, Bour dieu's habitus of regulated improvisations, Fish's in terpretive communities, and Derrida's eyes of its pupils. It discovers its social history texts like Bledstein's The Culture of Professionalism, which explores mid and late nineteenth century American middle class consolidated its status through a network of self-regulating organizations that enabled and safeguarded individual professional careers, and Larson's The Rise of Professionalism, which examines how occupations that we call professions organized themselves to attain market power . . . during 'great transformation' which changed structure and charac ter of European societies and their overseas offshoots nineteenth century (xvi). The project finds its stitutional history many books that, like Laur ence Veysey's influential work, study the emergence of American or those texts that deal spe cifically with characteristic activities of study England, Germany, and America. For example, Bal dick's The Social Mission of English Criticism examines the social effects and functions of work of the acknowledged leaders of English critical thought be tween 1848 and 1932 (15); Hohendahl's The Institution of Criticism provides a Marxist approach to the social models which [have] guide [d] and control [led] German criticism since eighteenth century (12); and Phyllis Franklin has sketched development of En glish studies America as well as begun a collective bi ography of nineteenth-century scholars who introduced English studies to American university system. Among works focusing on more recent develop ments, Webster's The Republic of Letters uses Kuhn's shared paradigms of normal science to trace rise and fall of literary charters of New Critics William H. Epstein