On the twentieth-anniversary of the publication of Gerald Graff's influential book Professing Literature, William Deresiewicz decides to glance back across the previous two decades and take stock of the discipline. He finds "a profession suffering from an epochal loss of confidence."

Using the Modern Language Association Job Information List as his guide, Deresiewicz is alarmed to discover that more than half the openings are in rhetoric and composition. "That is, not in a field of literature at all but in the teaching of expository writing, the 'service' component of an English department's role within the university."

Deresiewicz, a literary critic at Yale, highlights a few major trends in the profession. First, the number of students interested in studying literature is in steep "and apparently irreversible" decline. For example, Deresiewicz has seen his department shrink from fifty-five full-time faculty positions to about forty-five over the past ten years. As enrollment shrinks the discipline has become more desperate to attract attention which, in Deresiewicz's estimation, has led to an unprecedented situation where the intellectual agenda is being set by student tastes. "If grade schools behaved like this, every subject would be recess, and lunch would consist of chocolate cake," Deresiewicz writes.

Timothy Burke, a historian at Swarthmore, doesn't deny that "English as a discipline (and the humanities in general) are in intellectual disarray, and that many departments are adrift in terms of where to go next, or how to distribute their resources," but he has no patience for Deresiewicz's carping about the profession. He accuses Deresiewicz of exacerbating the problem with "superficial ridicule of a laundry list of topics and areas of study." 

"The humanities have a problem with people who are teaching and researching from fundamentally different perspectives who don’t talk to one another or bother to try and construct a dialogic relationship between their disparate practices," Burke writes. But "why should anyone who doesn’t share Deresiewicz’ own practices or interests sit down with him to talk about what they do if all he can offer in return is scorn and the axiomatic belief that his own interests represent the once and future core of a properly composed English Department?"