Widely considered the standard history of the profession of literary studies, Professing Literature unearths the long-forgotten ideas and debates that created the literature department as we know it today. In a readable and often-amusing narrative, Gerald Graff shows that the heated conflicts of our recent culture wars echo—and often recycle—controversies over how literature should be taught that began more than a century ago.Updated with a new preface by the author that ad...

Originally published in 1989, The Origins of Literary Studies in America brings together for the first time hard-to-find speeches, reports, and other writings by the founders of literary studies in the United States: Bliss Perry, Woodrow Wilson, Irving Babbitt, M. Carey Thomas, and many other scholars between 1874 and 1937.The selections—on teaching, the MLA, and the goals of the discipline—are readable, accessible, often charming and amusing; what is most striking about t...

First published in 1994, Black Planet is at first glance a reporting of David Shields’s journey following his hometown Seattle Supersonics through the 1994-95 NBA season. He went to the team's' home games; watched their away games on TV; listened to interviews and call-in shows; talked, or tried to talk, to players, coaches, and agents; attended charity events; corresponded with members of the Sonics newsgroup on the early internet.He kept a daily journal which then transformed int...

Gerald Graff argues that our schools and colleges make the intellectual life seem more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than it is or needs to be. Left clueless in the academic world, many students view the life of the mind as a secret society for which only an elite few qualify.In a refreshing departure from standard diatribes against academia, Graff shows how academic unintelligibility is unwittingly reinforced not only by academic jargon...

The best-selling book on academic writing—in use at more than 1,500 schools.“They Say / I Say” identifies the key rhetorical moves in academic writing, showing students how to frame their arguments in the larger context of what others have said and providing templates to help them make those moves. And, because these moves are central across all disciplines, the book includes chapters on writing in the sciences, writing in the social sciences, and—new to this edition—writing about ...

This issue of Profession contains Russell A. Berman’s introduction to his Presidential Forum, Language, Literature, Learning, held at the 2012 MLA convention, and the essays of the forum participants Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Christopher Freeburg, Jack Halberstam, B. Venkat Mani, and Imani Perry. To mark the journal’s thirty-fifth anniversary, the issue also features a retrospective sampling of articles that illustrate the evolution of the profession and of the professional issues...