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

Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Literature & Fiction

Graff, Gerald

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Since its first publication more than fifteen years ago, Literature Against Itself has achieved wide recognition as the first major critique of post-1960s cultural radicalism―and still, one of the best. In it, Gerald Graff argues that the reigning strategies for defending literature now end up by trivializing it, and he analyzes why and how they have gone wrong. He charges that our leading literary critics, whether they claim to be traditionalists or innovators, have taken positions that ultimately undermine the authority of art, literature, and criticism itself. "An extraordinarily important book, biting and cogent on every page."―Robert Boyers, Salmagundi. "In this recoil from the current anarchy of interpretation, Graff has affirmed that `literary thinking is inseparable from social and moral thinking."'―New York Times Book Review. "A wonderfully trenchant and illuminating inquiry… the shrewdness and cogency of his commentary are constantly arresting."―Virginia Quarterly Review.

Literature against itself: Literary ideas in modern society

Graff, Gerald, Poetic Statement And Critical Dogma

Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma

Univ of Chicago Pr

Professing Literature: An Institutional History

Professing Literature, Gerald Graff's history of American English departments, has just been reissued in a twentieth-anniversary edition. Published at the height of the culture wars--it came out a month before Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind--Graff's book brought a cooling sense of historical perspective to the inflamed passions of the moment. We'd been having the same arguments, it turned out, since universities started teaching English literature in the middle of the nineteenth century. The positions may have changed, but the issues had not. Classicists had been deposed by humanists, humanists by historians, historians by critics and now critics by theorists, but across the barricades of each revolution, the same accusations were flung: obfuscation, esotericism and overspecialization; naïveté, dilettantism and reaction. Teaching versus research, humane values versus methodological rigor, "literature itself" versus historical context.

Gerald Graff argues that our schools and colleges make the intellectual life seem more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than it is or needs to be. Left clueless in the academic world, many students view the life of the mind as a secret society for which only an elite few qualify. In a refreshing departure from standard diatribes against academia, Graff shows how academic unintelligibility is unwittingly reinforced not only by academic jargon and obscure writing, but by the disconnection of the curriculum and the failure to exploit the many connections between academia and popular culture. Finally, Graff offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more accessible to students, showing how students can enter the public debates that permeate their lives.

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Yale University Press

An eminent scholar and educator looks at the academic world from a crucial perspective for teachers—the perspective of those who don’t get it Gerald Graff argues that our schools and colleges make the intellectual life seem more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than it is or needs to be. Left clueless in the academic world, many students view the life of the mind as a secret society for which only an elite few qualify. In a refreshing departure from standard diatribes against academia, Graff shows how academic unintelligibility is unwittingly reinforced not only by academic jargon and obscure writing, but by the disconnection of the curriculum and the failure to exploit the many connections between academia and popular culture. Finally, Graff offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more accessible to students, showing how students can enter the public debates that permeate their lives.

Higher & Continuing Education

Essays on its background, themes, style, and ending accompany the story of Huck Finn and Jim, an escaped slave, as they travel down the Mississippi

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism)

TWAIN,MARK

United States

Bedford/St.Martins

Romeo and Juliet & Tempest

PHELAN, JAMES

Shakespeare., William

Literary

Bedford/St.Martin's

Bedford Anthology of American Literature V2 & Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 2e

Belasco, Susan

Johnson, Linck

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Books by Graff, Gerald