Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature: 1875-1900

Abstract

Who needs literary criticism? What is its job? The customary and hitherto powerful answer has been that literature itself needs criti cism. Criticism, in this view, is essentially a way of doing justice to literature, and the critic's chief constraint is the requirement of being adequate to literature. Thus we speak of uncriticized works as un justly neglected, and praise ingenious critics for saving the text. Most critics, if pressed to explain their work, will ultimately appeal to a number of different ideas about why literature is important (e.g., it fosters certain kinds of experience, it preserves certain values, it pre vents revolutions, it furthers revolutions, etc.). Various though they may be, all such explanations will have in common the idea that the importance of criticism is a consequence of the importance of litera ture, and criticism will be characterized as a response to the stimulus of literature.1 These assumptions are in operation every time we speak of methods or approaches. Because critics understand their profession in this way, the history of the profession is imagined as a continuation of the work of people who began writing criticism in their leisure out of a desire to justify and perfect the writing of literature (e.g., Rymer or Coleridge). As higher education expanded in the nineteenth century, it is supposed, more and more of the people with such interests and desires found themselves in university settings. Modern professional criticism, of the sort that is done in classrooms and in books and journals and conferences and academic departments, is in this view a stepped-up or more focused version of the amateur critics' attempt to render unto literature its due.2

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