John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, out in January from the University of Chicago Press, promises to be a landmark in the study of higher education. Or perhaps an epitaph. This sprawling amalgam of disciplinary history with the sociology of institutions would be of interest even if the future of its subject, academic literary study, were assured. But the book, which largely collects and reworks essays published over the last three decades, gains a note of poignant urgency because the topic it devotes so much learning and intelligence to may well be in permanent eclipse. Although Guillory is analytically detached about the fact that, as he says, large and irremediable forces “have irreversibly transformed the social conditions of literary study and relegated literature to a smaller place in the educational system and in society,” the attentive reader will hear Guillory’s characteristically subdued lament.