English Research Seminar --- Dr Simon Grimble (Durham university) 'Everyone hates a sad professor': imagining the literary critic in contemporary Britain and America

The paper will look at recent representations of the figure of the literary critic and situate them in relation to the history of thinking about the purpose and place of literary criticism within democratic societies, as well in relation to accounts of the role of the discipline by Joseph North, Rita Felski, John Guillory and Stefan Collini. It will begin by examining R.E.M.'s song ‘Sad Professor' (1998) and its apparent portrayal of an abandoned professor of English literature, who contemplates his fate, with the refrain of ‘everyone hates a drunk / everyone hates a bore / everyone hates a sad professor.'

It will set analysis of this conflicted figure within that provided by Michael Sandel in The Tyranny of Merit (2020) and by Grossmann and Hopkins in Polarized by Degrees (2024), which argue that meritocratic conceptions of education as a story of individual development have weakened social ties between the credentialled and non-credentialled and created cultures of resentment, with consequent effects in the political sphere. Literary criticism may be particularly exposed in this regard, in that, as Terry Eagleton once wrote, ‘it has always been an embarrassment to literary scholars that reading, along with talking about what you read, is something that a lot of non-scholarly people do as well.' This commonality with ordinary life means that the literary critic may have to show why their readings are sufficiently ‘expert' in order that they can be differentiated from those of the common reader, so that their status, their authority and perhaps even their employment may be held in place. But the paper will end by arguing, via Toril Moi, that democratic authority in literary criticism is something that can certainly exist; expertise does not necessarily mean alienating unwelcome parts of your audience and the space of what Raymond Williams called the ‘border country' is extensive.