Academic literary criticism, as we know it today, is only about a hundred years old. The discipline likes to claim ancient antecedents (anthologies of literary criticism and theory frequently start with Plato), but if we’re talking about writing that resembles what contemporary English professors still produce en masse—closely argued interpretations of literary texts in modern […]

Original source: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/03/09/departments-on-the-defensive-professing-criticism-john-guillory/