Professing Literature, Gerald Graff’s history of American English departments, has just been reissued in a 20th-anniversary edition. His argument is well known to cognoscenti:

Classicists had been deposed by humanists, humanists by historians, historians by critics and now critics by theorists, but . . . the same accusations were flung: obfuscation, esotericism and overspecialization; naïveté, dilettantism and reaction. Teaching versus research, humane values versus methodological rigor, “literature itself” versus historical context.

So what’s new? As William Deresiewicz writes, the “‘conflicts’ still exist, but given the larger context in which they’re taking place, they scarcely matter anymore. The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.”