Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies

Abstract

Abstract In September 1982 columnist Peter A. Jay of the Baltimore Sun turned from his usual concern with the intricacies of city politics to the absurdities, or so he perceived them, of the academy. His specific target was the world of English Studies, and he began by observing that “Professors, especially professors of literature, have always been fair game.” My purpose here is to inquire into the reason why this should be so, why professors of literature should so often be the objects of criticism and ridicule, and why the source of the criticism is so often the literary community itself. Jay is not a member of that community, but the charges he levels are familiar; we have all heard them, and some of us may even have made them. The bill of indictment contains several particulars, but the basic complaint is that teachers of literature, and especially of English, have abandoned their proper study, “the study of life itself, as seen by writers of skill and vision,” and given themselves over to the trivialities that accompany “specialization run amok,” to topics (the examples are Jay’s) like “Lesbian Feminist Poetry in Texas” and “The Trickster Figure in Chicano and Black Literature” or “other ephemera.”