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Fantasies of the New Class: The New Criticism, Harvard Sociology, and the Idea of the University

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Stephen Schryer
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Abstract

This essay examines the professionalization of United States literary studies and sociology between the 1930s and 1950s under the aegis of John Crowe Ransom's New Criticism and Talcott Parsons's structural functionalism. These paradigms pulled the disciplines to opposite poles of the professional class: Ransom argued for a less sociological literary criticism, while Parsons distanced sociology from the literary tendencies of the Chicago school. However, both implemented similar professional ideologies that synthesized their disciplines' technical and moral claims, and both paradigms involved fantasies that specialized, disciplinary work within the academy can have a broader, moral significance. These ideas remained fantasies, which contradicted the actual effects of the New Criticism and structural functionalism; professionalism became reflexively oriented toward disciplinary self-perpetuation, isolating literature and sociology from the public they were supposed to reform. Ransom and Parsons thus exemplify the disintegration of publicly responsible professionalism—an event with broad implications for the “new class” of postwar knowledge workers.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 3 , May 2007 , pp. 663 - 678
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by The Modern Language Association of America

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