Token Professionals and Master Critics

James J. Sosnoski is Professor of English at Miami University in Ohio and Executive Director of Alternative Educational Environments, a non-profit organization for the development of collaborative research through telecommunication. He is the author of Modern Skeletons in Postmodern Closets: A Cultural Studies Alternative to the Disciplining of Literary Studies.

"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