The personal forms of authority to which these professors clung stand at an ironic distance from the courses outlined in Chapter 2, in which the factual bodies of knowledge associated with the text’s language, sources and historical background offered themselves as a ready solution to the problem of how literary knowledge could be taught and examined. As we have seen, such knowledge soon became central to the emerging discipline of … Read the rest
Tag: literary historian
The new professors and professional criticism
The careers of many of the early professors of English blur the boundaries between the terms ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’. The literary historian W. J. Courthope was a civil servant and assistant editor of the National Review before becoming Professor of Poetry at Oxford (although this was an honorary post rather than one that carried ‘professional’ academic status); George Saintsbury worked as a schoolmaster and journalist until his election to the … Read the rest
Literary illness
illness
In her well-known 1978 book Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag says, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place” (3). Illness affects all human beings … Read the rest