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Book Cover for: Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, John Guillory

Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

John Guillory

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In Cultural Capital, John Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical framework. The result is a book that promises to recast not only the debate about the literary curriculum but also the controversy over "multiculturalism" and the current "crisis of the humanities." Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of representing social groups in the canon than of distributing "cultural capital" in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, the practices of reading and writing. He declines to reduce the history of canon formation to one of individual reputations or the ideological contents of particular works, arguing that a critique of the canon fixated on the concept of authorial identity overlooks historical transformations in the forms of cultural capital that have underwritten judgments of individual authors. The most important of these transformations is the emergence of "literature" in the later eighteenth century as the name of the cultural capital of the bourgeoisie. In three case studies, Guillory charts the rise and decline of the category of "literature" as the organizing principle of canon formation in the modern period. He considers the institutionalization of the English vernacular canon in eighteenth-century primary schools; the polemic on behalf of a New Critical modernist canon in the university; and the appearance of a "canon of theory" supplementing the literary curriculum in the graduate schools and marking the onset of a terminal crisis of literature as the dominant form of cultural capital in the schools. The final chapter ofCultural Capital examines recent theories of value judgment, which have strongly reaffirmed cultural relativism as the necessary implication of canon critique. Contrasting the relativist position with Pierre Bourdieu's very different sociology of judgment, Guillory concludes that the

Book Details

  • Publisher: University of Chicago Press
  • Publish Date: Mar 1st, 1995
  • Pages: 408
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.89in - 5.81in - 0.98in - 1.21lb
  • EAN: 9780226310442
  • Categories: • English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

About the Author

Guillory, John: - John Guillory is the Julius Silver Professor of English at New York University. He is the author of Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation and Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Mentioner image for: Christopher Grobe (@cgrobe.bsky.social)
Christopher Grobe (@cgrobe.bsky.social)
@Confessant
2 years

Performance historian, director of @ACinquiry. ART OF CONFESSION (https://t.co/iN3zKoRmm1). Now writing on tech&the arts, politics&performance.

@ryanbunch @donagalella @sarahinthepark And the locus classicus in literary studies is John Guillory's book CULTURAL CAPITAL.

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Mentioner image for: Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
@isanchezprado
1 year

Scholar of Mexico, Literature, Cinema, Food. Faculty @WUSTL. Life in STL, heart in CDMX. Read me at https://t.co/2jHDkqrzY0

My article on John Gullory, "Cultural Capital. Reflections from a Latin Americanist," has been published in Genre, as part of a dossier on his foundational book edited by @mervatim and Justin Sider. https://t.co/qHJW8vUxvi

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The Nation
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Founded by abolitionists in 1865. Committed to progressive journalism. Subscribe: https://t.co/iJh9hpMCwv.

John Guillory’s "Cultural Capital" may have been a final witness to one kind of literary criticism, stable as it once was; "Professing Criticism" is a witness to what is replacing it. https://t.co/5HP5iR2mLN

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