John David Guillory (born 1952) is an American literary critic best known for his book Cultural Capital (1993). He is the Julius Silver Professor of English at
New York University.
Life
Guillory "grew up in New Orleans in a working-class Catholic family, and attended Jesuit schools."[1] Guillory gained his BA at
Tulane University, and a PhD in English from
Yale University in 1979.[2] His PhD, Poetry and Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History,[3] was subsequently published as a monograph. Guillory taught at
Yale University[4] (1979–89),
Johns Hopkins University[5] (1989–97), and
Harvard University (1997–99) before moving to New York University in 1999.[6]
Guillory's book Cultural Capital (1993) argued that "the category of 'literature' names the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie, a form of capital increasingly marginal to the social function of the present educational system".[7] After an opening chapter on the debate over the
literary canon, Cultural Capital took up several 'case studies':
Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the
close reading of
New Criticism, and
literary theory after
Paul De Man.[8] Guillory viewed the rigour of 'Theory' as an attempt by literary scholars to reclaim its cultural capital from a newly ascendant technical professional class. Its unconscious aim was "to model the intellectual work of the theorist on the new social form of intellectual work, the technobureaucratic labour of the new professional-managerial class."[9] A final chapter gave a history of the concept of
value from
Adam Smith to
Barbara Herrnstein Smith.
Awards and honors
1992: Best American Essays[10] for "Canon, Syllabus, List"[11]
1994:
René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association for Cultural Capital, "an uncompromising study of the problem of canon formation itself and what that problem tells us about the crisis in contemporary education."[12]
1997: Class of 1932 Fellow of the Council of the Humanities, Princeton University[13]
2001: Tanner Lectures on Human Values at UC Berkeley,[14] respondent to Sir Frank Kermode[15]
^Guillory, John (1993). Cultural Capital. University of Chicago Press. p. 186. Cited in Ruth, JEnnifer (2006). Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel. Ohio State University Press. p. 11.