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Of course, in many ordinary cases of professionalization, becoming more specialized wouldn't seem to be that much of a problem, spiritual or otherwise. Sure, you can't write a compelling memoir, but you'll have a prodigious near-miraculous backhand. In the case of the fiction-writer, however, becom…

In laying out this argument, Guillory draws on the famous portrait of the scholar that Friedrich Nietzsche evokes in The Gay Science:

In a scholar's book [Nietzsche writes] there is nearly always something oppressive, oppressed: the "specialist" emerges somehow-his eagerness, his seriousness, …

Creative writing, at least as Wallace saw it in the late 1980s, is no oasis from the perils of professionalization. On Wallace's account, the literary professional seems fated to suffer from what Guillory wants to call a "déformation professionnelle" by virtue of being a professional in the first p…

In a recent article, Tim Yu gives a good overview of Wallace's
"deeply ambivalent" relationship to professionalization and the pro-fessionalization of creative writing!' As Yu notes, Wallace's writing repeatedly features top professionals and professional-like figures who specialize in incredibly …

I'll close with this: I distinctly remember sitting in the audience of a roundtable discussion at that early conference at Illinois State. And I remember it because something one of the panelists said that night has stuck with me all these years later. The panel was discussing the random acts of ki…