Guillory’s Agon: Et in Academia Ego

• Published in: Modern philology Vol. 121; no. 2; pp. 238 - 249
• Main Author: Armstrong, Isobel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago The University of Chicago Press 01.11.2023; University of Chicago, acting through its Press
• Subjects: Documents; Humanities; Poetics; Writers
• ISSN: 0026-8232; 1545-6951
• DOI: 10.1086/727171

To chart the historical and structural depredations he sees, Guillory explores in deep scholarly depth and range the history of professionalization, the place of belles lettres, rhetoric, and philology in the subject's history, the function of the composition class, the incoherence of a global syllabus that attempts to court the contemporary student, the disaster of redundant doctoral students. It is a recursive procedure, returning to the same thematics at different points in the work. Here, Armstrong briefly names ten themes where Guillory sees depletion of the discipline as structurally and historically inevitable, but her focus will be on chapter 4, Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities, a discussion that springs from Erwin Panofsky's essay, The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline. Guillory is an innately civil writer, this is why some of his generalizations remain just this. A movement to specific instances, his manner of proceeding implies, would be invidious. Guillory creates a poetics out of Panofsky's distinction between documents and monuments, a distinction that actually occupies quite a small part of Panofsky's essay and one in which the term monument appears quite late on in a discussion of documents.