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This book addresses literary critics in mainstream institutions who, though they vastly outnumber their colleagues in more prestigious institutions, have little voice in the profession. It examines the structures through which the institution of literary criticism pressures its members to accept orthodoxy/heterodoxy as categories to describe their work, which in turn provokes theory wars. This opposition produces a method/ application dichotomy which renders members' pursuits scientistic.
"It is the most breathtakingly honest account of the profession that I have read, unparalleled in its analysis of the current crisis in English studies and in its proposal for reform." — James A. Berlin, Purdue University
"Sosnoski unabashedly points out the hierarchical distinction between the elite members of the profession and the rest of us. I think that he sidles up to the real insight in this book—that literary criticism exists only because it has been disciplined. That is, without the discipline of literary studies, the writing and reading of 'literature' would still be done as a leisure activity, or for pay by writers and journalists. All those folks in all those universities who write all those articles for PMLA would be out of work." — Sharon Crowley, University of Iowa
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue on Configuring
Part 1: Professionals and Their Masters
1. Token Professionals and Professorial Templates
2. Canonical Critics
3. Homo Criticus Americanus
4. The Kritikroman
5. The CV as Personal History
6. The Magister Implicatus: A Configuration of Orthodoxy
Part 2: Orthodoxy and Critical Binds
7. The Compulsion to be Orthodox
8. When Bonds Becomes Binds
9. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a Counterallegory of Orthodoxy
10. The Hyde Effect
11. The Resentment of Theory
Part 3: Options and Alternatives
12. Theories Need Not Be Methods
13. Theoretical Lore
14. Error as Heuristic
15. Critical Registers
16. Who Benefits by Literary Study?
17. Rhetoric and Suffering
18. The Way in Is the Way Out
Notes
Works Cited
Name Index
Subject Index