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 place. The term "déformation professionnelle" designates the idea that professionals have a tendency to see the world in a partial way, through the lens of their training, rather than from a general or human perspective. Such deformation is not, on Guillory's account, a personal failing of the individual person—or even a negative phenomenon!— but is rather "an unavoidable by-product of the assertion of that autonomy enabling the cultivation of professional expertise to begin with" and a disposition "that insulates such expertise to some extent from the tyranny of the market and from the draconian interventions of the political system."