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Cultural Capital
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 regula...
Professing Criticism
A sociological history of literary study—both as a discipline and as a profession. As the humanities in higher education struggle with a labor crisis and with declining enrollments, the travails of literary study are especially profound. No scholar has analyzed the discipline’s contradictions as authoritatively as John Guillory. In this much-anticipated new book, Guillory shows how the study of literature has been organized, both historically and in the modern era, both before and after its professionalization. The traces of this volatile history, he reveals, have solidified into permanent features of the university. Literary study continues to be troubled by the relation between discipl...
Cultural Capital
“[A] landmark work . . . which showed how literary evaluation draws authority from the institutions—principally universities—within which it is practiced.” —The New Yorker Winner of the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association 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.” Employing concepts drawn from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Guillory argue...
On Close Reading
"At a time of debate about the future of "English" as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study, few terms appear more frequently than "close reading." But what exactly is close reading, and where did it come from? Here John Guillory, author of the acclaimed Professing Criticism, takes up two puzzles. First, why did the New Critic--who supposedly made close reading central to literary study--so seldom use the term? And second, why have scholars not been better able to define close reading? Guillory treats these as intertwined puzzles. In fact, the purported fathers of close reading, he argues, weren't aiming to devise a method of reading at all. And this lack of specificity ...
This Is Enlightenment
Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, “What is Enlightenment?” The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here—not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant’s query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volumewith the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.
The Elsewhere
"The Elsewhere." Or, midbar-biblical Hebrew for both "wilderness" and "speech." A place of possession and dispossession, loss and nostalgia. But also a place that speaks. Ingeniously using a Talmudic interpretive formula about the disposition of boundaries, Newton explores narratives of "place, flight, border, and beyond." The writers of The Elsewhere are a disparate company of twentieth-century memoirists and fabulists from the Levant (Palestine/Israel, Egypt) and East Central Europe. Together, their texts-cunningly paired so as to speak to one another in mutually revelatory ways-narrate the paradox of the "near distance."
Literary Culture in a World Transformed
Literary studies are in danger of being left behind in the twenty-first century. Print culture risks becoming a thing of the past in the multimedia age; meanwhile, human life and society are undergoing rapid changes as a result of new technologies, the intensification of global capitalism, and the effects of human actions on the environment.In this transformed world, William Paulson argues for a radical renewal of literary studies. Modern literary culture has defined itself, in opposition to science, politics, and commerce, as a protected sphere of democratic and free inquiry, but today that autonomy may lead to isolation from the real dynamics of cultural and global change. Paulson clearly ...
Shared Waters
The present volume contains general essays on: unequal African/Western academic exchange; the state and structure of postcolonial studies; representing male violence in Zimbabwe’s wars; parihaka in the poetic imagination of Aotearoa New Zealand; Middle Eastern, Nigerian, Moroccan, and diasporic Indian women’s writing; community in post-Independence Maltese poetry in English; key novels of the Portuguese colonies; the TV series The Kumars at No. 42; fictional representations of India; the North in western Canadian writing; and a pedagogy of African-Canadian literature. As well as these, there is a selection of poems from Malta by Daniel Massa, Adrian Grima, Norbert Bugeja, Immanuel Mifsud...
Walter Besant
In the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain's most lionized living novelists. Today he is comparatively unknown. Bringing together literary critics and book historians, as well as social and cultural historians, this volume provides a major reassessment of Besant.
Worlding a Peripheral Literature
Bringing together the analyses of the literary world-system, translation studies, and the research of European cultural nationalism, this book contests the view that texts can be attributed global importance irrespective of their origin, language, and position in the international book market. Focusing on Slovenian literature, almost unknown to world literature studies, this book addresses world literature’s canonical function in the nineteenth-century process of establishing European letters as national literatures. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, (semi)peripheral national movements sought international recognition through, among other things, the newly invented figure of the national poet. Writers central to dependent national communities were canonized to represent their respective cultures to the norm-giving Other – the emerging world literary canon and its aesthetic ideology. Hence, national literatures asserted their linguo-cultural individuality through the process of worlding; that is, by their positioning in the international literary world informed by the supposed universality of the aesthetic.
