The professionalization of reading literature is the child of the professionalization of the discipline of English literary studies. To become an academic discipline, English had to adopt the disinterested analytical stance of the sciences, lest it appear dilettante. The global spread of English and Anglophone literary studies forces us to address the validity of the overriding objective of literary pedagogy, which is to teach students to read literary texts in the same way as their professors do. ‘Success’ in the discipline requires students to mimic the thinking and behavior of an academic professional. The problem is that most students will not make a living by writing, reading or teaching literature, or as editors, journalists, publishers, or academics. Most will, at best, be content to remain ‘amateur’ readers – and I must be clear that by amateur I don’t mean inferior; I mean someone who reads for themselves, for pleasure and self-improvement, just as by professional I don’t mean ‘better’. Another problem is that literary programs in institutions of higher education face falling enrollments which threaten their very existence. It would make sense, therefore, for literary academics to turn their focus to the far greater numbers of ‘amateur’ readers. But here we face the complication registered in the idea of the academic professional. Pierre Bourdieu argues that by restricting access to academic knowledge, intellectuals increase the social value of their academic abilities. Professors increase the payoff – the cultural capital – of their intellectual activity by making it as difficult and exclusive as possible. English studies implicates itself in this effort by the global spread of an Anglo-American disciplinary professionalism, a mode of difficulty and exclusivity based on geo-historically specific ideologies, values, and pedagogical objectives. My presentation will critique this view in order to see it as a potential. The global spread opens up a space in which to examine how academic professionalism forms and is formed by its object, literature. The nature of literary study – indeed, of the humanities in general – requires a particular disposition to knowledge, and more so than the sciences involves personal taste and motivation in its modes of investigation. But why are English professors reluctant to ally the book club and Goodreads reader with their professional ways of reading? One reason is a kind of blindness to the classroom as the foundational place of higher education. Instead, teaching must respond to the fact that a literary text may not contain the kind of cultural value in one culture that it has in another. It is worth considering how English departments both inside and outside the Anglosphere could reframe their goals and pedagogies.
