Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

An enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory's formative text on the literary canon.

Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory's Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge on which culture has long been based. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups and more as a question of the distribution of cultural capital in schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.

Now, as the crisis of the canon has evolved into the so-called crisis of the humanities, Guillory's groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this enlarged edition: "Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation--these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy."

Author: John Guillory
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 10/24/2023
Pages: 440
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.83w x 1.26d
ISBN13: 9780226830599
ISBN10: 0226830594
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

About the Author
John Guillory is the Julius Silver Professor of English at New York University. He is coeditor of What's Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory and the author of Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History and Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.