Episode Details

My guest on the show today is Len Gutkin, editor of The Chronicle Review, which is the ideas and analysis section of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Len, in his freelance life, is a critic whose essays have appeared in Liberties, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

He got his PhD in English from Yale in 2014, spent some time as a postdoc at Harvard, and has spent the years since largely at Chronicle, writing about the intellectual and institutional life of the American university with, from my perspective, an admirable sense of skin in the game; is somebody who cares about this stuff, and you can sense it in his writing.

This episode with Len is something of a throwback for the show. A lot of my early episodes were pretty squarely focused on the culture wars — wokeness, anti-wokeness, what was going on in the academy, in journalism, in politics that kind of thing — and I have definitely drifted away from that territory, I think for good reason, in large part because I, like so many other people, kind of ran out of interesting new things to say about it.

But I am coming back to it here because Len’s recent [paywalled - email Len for access] essay in Liberties, which he titles “Reading for Sins,” is the kind of piece that can probably only be written in retrospect, with a bit of distance from the hullabaloo. Len takes on what he calls at one point, maybe with a hint of apology, “snowflake hermeneutics”: the tendency, particularly acute in the literary humanities over the last decade or so, to read works of art primarily, or at least substantially, for the sins they contain; to fixate on the morally or politically objectionable aspects of books at the expense of everything else about them.

He approaches that less to condemn it, though there’s no secret as you’re reading it that he’s not a fan of this approach to literature, than to give it what I think of as a genuine institutional and intellectual history — to understand it as something other than the thing that gives Chris Rufo too many owie feelings.

To do that, Len ranges pretty widely. He gets into the sociology of taboo, the history of literary education, and, among other examples, a 2023 controversy over Merve Emre’s New Yorker review of John Guillory’s book Professing Criticism.

Guillory’s book argued that literary scholars as a profession had made a rather grievous conceptual error at some point along the way: they came to think that their work as scholars was justified, at least in part, on the basis of its beneficial political impact on society. In some extreme cases, scholars saw themselves explicitly as activists, but in many cases it was somewhat more indirect. They had constructed a paradigm in which the critical, inquisitive, deconstructive work they did served clear political ends.

Guillory was critical of that. Emre, reviewing his book for The New Yorker, lexplored his argument and then added some of her own, drawing on her own experience in academia. In doing so, and this is key to how Len gets into it in his essay, she repeatedly used a phrase that Guillory himself had used to characterize what had happened to his field: “professional deformation.” It is the English translation of what was a originally a French expression used to describe actual physical deformations, like the way coal miners might develop a distinctive slump or hunch.

That phrase