Sometimes playful, always provocative, Professions is a collection of searching and candid conversations -- ranging from dialogues to tongue-in-cheek diatribes -- on the issues that face literary and cultural critics today.This volume bares professional concerns, relationships, ambitions, and insecurities about working in academe. Professions provides hard-to-get insider information for students contemplating an academic career. It also challenges professional scholars to retrieve the intellectual curiosity that drew them to scholarship in the first place while demonstrating how disagreement on controversial issues can be conducted with respect, good humor, and an open mind.