John Guillory

Last updated
John David Guillory
Born
John David Guillory

1952 (age 72–73)
United States
Occupation(s)Literary critic, author

John David Guillory (born 1952) is an American literary critic whose "distinguished career has transformed the ways in which the discipline of literary studies understands itself." [1] He is the Julius Silver Professor of English [2] Emeritus [3] at New York University. Guillory has focused his scholarship on rhetoric, [4] the sociology of criticism, [5] the history of the humanities, [6] and early media studies, [7] especially the work of Marshall McLuhan, [8] Walter Ong, [9] and I. A. Richards. [10] He has also written extensively on Renaissance figures such as Spenser, [11] Shakespeare, [12] Marlowe, [13] Bacon, [14] Milton, [15] and Hobbes. [16]

Contents

Life

Guillory "grew up in New Orleans in a working-class Catholic family, and attended Jesuit schools." [17] He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Tulane University in 1974, and earned a PhD in English from Yale University in 1979. [18] His doctoral thesis, "Poetry and Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History," [19] was subsequently revised as his first monograph. [20] Guillory taught at Yale University [21] (1979–89), Johns Hopkins University [22] (1989–97), and Harvard University (1997–99) before moving to New York University in 1999. [23] He has served on the Executive Committee of the Folger Shakespeare Library; on the Supervisory Board of the English Institute; on the Editorial Board of the journals Profession and English Literary History ; and on the Executive Council, the Prize Committee for First Book Publication, the Committee on Professional Employment, and the Committee on the Bibliography of the Teaching of Literature [24] for the Modern Language Association.

Guillory's book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation [25] (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". [26] After an opening chapter on the debate over the literary canon, [27] Cultural Capital took up several 'case studies': Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard , the close reading of New Criticism, [28] and literary theory after Paul De Man. [29] 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," [30] "as Barbara and John Ehrenreich termed it." [31] While the title phrase "cultural capital" invokes the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Guillory has said that "The book that I’m always trying to point people toward is Alvin Gouldner’s work The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class . That’s where I originally started to think about the issue of the professional managerial class and the possibility of thinking about literary study in the context of the sociology of professions." [32] A final chapter gave a history of the concept of value from Adam Smith to Barbara Herrnstein Smith.

Guillory's Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) was an "attempt to disabuse literary scholars, literary professionals, from the idealizations that we cling to so strongly and don’t want to give up." [33] Critic Stefan Collini called the volume "the most penetrating, and in some ways most original, study we have of the forces that have shaped the history of literary study, especially in the US." [34]

In December 2024, Guillory delivered the keynote address at The Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) on "Scholarship, Activism, and the Autonomy of Social Spheres," described as "an attempt to clarify a longstanding controversy in the history of humanities scholarship in the university, namely its relation to political activism, and to the political in general." [35]

In May 2025, Guillory gave the British Academy Lecture at Queen's University Belfast, titled: "'It’s not what you know, it’s who you know': The Problem of Social Capital," [36] applying "Bourdieu’s theory to an analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby (1925), with the aim of establishing the relation between cultural capital and social capital as two forms of 'knowing.' This relation correlates Gatsby's desire for social capital, which he uses to pursue Daisy Buchanan, as part of Fitzgerald's bid for the text’s canonical status as a 'great' American novel."

Guillory is currently writing a book entitled Freedom of Thought: Philosophy and Literature in the English Renaissance. [37]

Awards and honors

1992: Best American Essays [38] for "Canon, Syllabus, List" [39]

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." [40]

1997: Class of 1932 Fellow of the Humanities Council, Princeton University [41]

2001: Tanner Lectures on Human Values at UC Berkeley, [42] respondent to Sir Frank Kermode [43]

2016: Francis Andrew March Award from the Association of Departments of English for "Distinguished Service to the Profession of English Studies."

2016: Golden Dozen Award for teaching, New York University

2024: Wilbur Cross Medal "for exceptional scholarship, teaching, and public service," Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS)

Books

References

  1. ↑ "Four distinguished alumni awarded Wilbur Cross Medals | Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences". gsas.yale.edu. Retrieved 2024-10-10.
  2. ↑ "People". as.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-15.
  3. ↑ "Emeritus/Retired Faculty". as.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-18.
  4. ↑ Guillory, John (2017). "Mercury's Words: The End of Rhetoric and the Beginning of Prose" . Representations (138): 59–86. doi:10.1525/rep.2017.138.1.59. ISSN   0734-6018. JSTOR   26420601.
  5. ↑ Guillory, John; Williams, Jeffrey J. (2004). "Toward a Sociology of Literature: An Interview with John Guillory". Minnesota Review. 61 (1): 95–109. ISSN   2157-4189.
  6. ↑ "Reflecting on the Evolution of the Humanities: An Interview with John Guillory". JHI Blog. Retrieved 2024-09-15.
  7. ↑ Guillory, John (January 2010). "Genesis of the Media Concept" . Critical Inquiry. 36 (2): 321–362. doi:10.1086/648528. ISSN   0093-1896.
  8. ↑ Guillory, John (2015). "Marshall McLuhan, Rhetoric, and the Prehistory of Media Studies". Affirmations: of the Modern. 3 (1): 78. doi: 10.57009/am.50 .
  9. ↑ Guillory, John (2021-09-02). "Reading Ong reading McLuhan" . Textual Practice. 35 (9): 1487–1505. doi:10.1080/0950236X.2021.1964762. ISSN   0950-236X.
  10. ↑ Guillory, John (2023). "The Words on the Screen: I. A. Richards as Media Theorist" . Modern Language Quarterly. 84 (4): 509–527. doi:10.1215/00267929-10779264.
  11. ↑ Guillory, John (2019-05-06), Poetic Authority. Spenser, Milton, and Literary History , Columbia University Press, doi:10.7312/guil92340, ISBN   978-0-231-88822-6 , retrieved 2024-09-15
  12. ↑ ""To Please the Wiser Sort" Violence and Philosophy in 'Hamlet'" , Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, Routledge, pp. 92–119, 2013-10-28, doi:10.4324/9780203949498-10, ISBN   978-0-203-94949-8 , retrieved 2024-09-15
  13. ↑ Guillory, John (2014). "Marlowe, Ramus, and the Reformation of Philosophy" . ELH. 81 (3): 693–732. doi:10.1353/elh.2014.0039. ISSN   1080-6547.
  14. ↑ Guillory, John (2009-01-10), The Bachelor State: Philosophy and Sovereignty in Bacon's 'New Atlantis' , Princeton University Press, pp. 49–74, doi:10.1515/9781400827152.49, ISBN   978-1-4008-2715-2 , retrieved 2024-09-15
  15. ↑ Guillory, John (2019-01-03), "The Father's House: 'Samson Agonistes' in its Historical Moment" , Re-Membering Milton, Routledge, pp. 148–176, doi:10.4324/9780429029493-7, ISBN   978-0-429-02949-3 , retrieved 2024-09-15
  16. ↑ "The Flights (and Fights) of Virtual Motion: Professor John Guillory gives a talk on Thomas Hobbes (by Peter Tasca) – The Blotter". 2017-02-23. Retrieved 2024-09-15.
  17. ↑ Schuessler, Jennifer (2023-02-03). "What Is Literary Criticism For?". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-02-03.
  18. ↑ "Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities" (PDF). Humanities Institute at Stony Brook. Retrieved 18 October 2022.
  19. ↑ Guillory, John (1979). Poetry and Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (Thesis). OCLC   917951510.
  20. ↑ Guillory, John (May 1983). Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History. Columbia University Press. ISBN   978-0-231-05541-3.
  21. ↑ Guillory, John; Williams, Jeffrey J. (2004). "Toward a Sociology of Literature: An Interview with John Guillory". Minnesota Review. 61 (1): 95–109. ISSN   2157-4189.
  22. ↑ "Johns Hopkins Magazine - April 1994 Issue". pages.jh.edu. Retrieved 2023-02-01.
  23. ↑ Scott Heller; Alison Schneider; Katharine Mangan (29 January 1999). "Noted Scholar Moves From Harvard to NYU for Geographic Reasons; UNLV's Business Dean Cites Research Deficiencies in Leaving; Yale Grants Tenure to 3 Women" . Retrieved 18 October 2022.
  24. ↑ Guillory, John (2002). "The Very Idea of Pedagogy" . Profession: 164–171. doi:10.1632/074069502X85121. ISSN   0740-6959. JSTOR   25595741.
  25. ↑ Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  26. ↑ Guillory, John (1993). Cultural Capital. University of Chicago Press. p. 186. Cited in Redfield, Marc (May 2005). "Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man". Romantic Circles. Retrieved 18 October 2022.
  27. ↑ Guillory, John (1991). "Canon, Syllabus, List: A Note on the Pedagogic Imaginary" . Transition (52): 36–54. doi:10.2307/2935123. ISSN   0041-1191. JSTOR   2935123.
  28. ↑ Guillory, John (1983). "The Ideology of Canon-Formation: T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks" . Critical Inquiry. 10 (1): 173–198. doi:10.1086/448242. ISSN   0093-1896. JSTOR   1343411.
  29. ↑ Redfield, Marc (May 2005). "Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man". Romantic Circles. Retrieved 18 October 2022.
  30. ↑ 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.
  31. ↑ Emre, Merve (2023). "Introduction: Thirty Years after 'Cultural Capital'". Genre. 56 (1): 1–13. doi:10.1215/00166928-10346769.
  32. ↑ Swoboda, Jessica (2024-05-02). "Interpret or Judge?: John Guillory on the Future of Literary Criticism". Public Books. Retrieved 2024-09-18.
  33. ↑ Dames, Nicholas; Plotz, John (2024-05-02). "Interpret or Judge?: John Guillory on the Future of Literary Criticism". Public Books. Retrieved 2024-09-15.
  34. ↑ Collini, Stefan (2022-12-01). "Exaggerated Ambitions". London Review of Books. Vol. 44, no. 23. ISSN   0260-9592 . Retrieved 2024-09-15.
  35. ↑ "John Guillory (NYU): Scholarship, Activism, and the Autonomy of Social Spheres - ZfL Berlin". www.zfl-berlin.org. Retrieved 2024-10-26.
  36. ↑ "13.05.2025 British Academy Lecture | School of Arts, English and Languages | Queen's University Belfast". www.qub.ac.uk. 2019-09-17. Retrieved 2025-04-11.
  37. ↑ "Four Graduate School alumni awarded 2024 Wilbur Cross Medals | Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences". gsas.yale.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-15.
  38. ↑ "Best American Essays 1992 – Transition Magazine". transitionmagazine.fas.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2023-02-01.
  39. ↑ Guillory, John (1991). "Canon, Syllabus, List: A Note on the Pedagogic Imaginary" . Transition (52): 36–54. doi:10.2307/2935123. ISSN   0041-1191. JSTOR   2935123.
  40. ↑ "The René Wellek Prize Citation 1994 | American Comparative Literature Association". www.acla.org. Retrieved 2023-02-01.
  41. ↑ "NYU Prof. to Discuss the Difference Between Professional and Lay Reading". Office of Communications. Retrieved 2023-02-01.
  42. ↑ "2001-2002 Lecture Series | Tanner Lectures". tannerlectures.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2023-02-03.
  43. ↑ Guillory, John. ""It Must Be Abstract"". academic.oup.com. Retrieved 2023-02-03.
  44. ↑ Cultural Capital. University of Chicago Press.
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