After browsing John Guillory

I’m browsing John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). I find many good observations in what I’ve read: about the displacement of the literary text as an object of study, about criticism of society as the motive of scholarship, about the contracting of literary study to modern and contemporary realist prose narratives “amenable to interpretation within a political thematic” — developments that I too lament.

But then I read this passage in an essay about graduate education, with a suggestion about how to improve doctoral study:

What I want to propose more urgently is a way of relating the temporary career of graduate students to the lives they will most likely have after graduate school, if circumstances do not favor their getting a tenure-track job. I argued in another venue (at the MLA conference of 2020) that graduate students need to be apprised of market conditions and of alternatives to the career of college professor as soon as they arrive on campus. Only such honesty and transparency, instated at the very beginning of the first semester, has any chance of preventing or mitigating the bitterness of disappointed expectations. . . .

“The very beginning of the first semester”? Isn’t that a bit like — or more than a bit like — explaining the problems of owning a time-share after the buyer has already signed?

Guillory further suggests that the best way to help graduate students maintain an engagement with literary study after graduate school

is to introduce [them] to as many alumni of the system as are willing and able to speak to them about their careers after graduate school. Many of these alumni, we know, did not get tenure-track jobs but escaped the trap of adjunct labor; many are now employed in nonacademic professions. Let us invite them to return and tell us what they got from their experience in graduate school.

That certainly sounds like a risky proposition. And notice that phrase: “the trap of adjunct labor.” Here, as in English studies generally, the emphasis is on encouraging students to identify with the lucky few deemed winners. So yes, even if you don’t get a tenure-track position, you too can be a museum curator, &c.

Browsing this book makes me think anew about my life in academia, which I call a fluke life.