RECENTLY THE Secret Author spent a relaxing night or two not browsing impressionably through John Guillory’s Professing Criticism (Chicago University Press).
Professor Guillory teaches at NYU and has written a stratospherically high-end book about the way in which the discipline known as “literary studies” has organised itself historically, whose chapter titles alone — “Monuments and Documents On the Object of Study in the Humanities”, for example — will give some idea of the issues at stake.
Professor G is reporting from a crisis — or
