This book presents fourteen of R. B. Heilman's essays on the teaching of English and the profession of the humanities. Discussed are administrative ways and means, pedagogical shibboleths and heresies, uses and abuses of literacy, cliches of style, moot issues of history and criticism, and the nature of the humanities and their continuing significance. Chapter titles include "The Ghost on the Ramparts: A Chairman on the Chairmanship,""Literature and Growing Up: The Ends of Literary Study,""The Full Man and the Fullness Thereof: Printed Page versus Sound and Light,""Except He Come to Composition,""The Cult of Personality: Hell's Spells,""Teaching Careers and Graduate School: Programs and Postures,""Freedom from Speech: Vigilance Revisited,""Verbal Traffic and Moral Freight: Gown and Town,""Cliches and Anticliches: Critics and Others,""The Antiquarians and the Up-to-Date: Attitudes toward History,""Historian and Critic: The Types,""Outside the Laws: The Humanities versus the Sciences,""Humanisticism and Melodrama: Styles in Combat," and "Humanistic Education as Comedy: A Funambulist's Analogy." (HOD)