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. Guillory's hypothesis is that the appropriate frame for understanding this relation is the autonomy of social spheres, as expressed in the historical tendency of different spheres to become depoliticized over time. The paradigm case for this tendency is the depoliticization of the religious sphere with the end of the wars of religion at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He argues that depoliticization enabled the development of autonomous social spheres, resulting in many social benefits, beginning with the condition of peace following the wars of religion. At the same time, autonomous social spheres are periodically subject to re-politicization for various reasons, a tendency manifest in university scholarship at the present moment. Guillory examines several recent arguments defending the identity of scholarship with political activism, attempting to grasp thereby the forces impelling politicization and depoliticization."[35]
He is currently at work on a book entitled Freedom of Thought: Philosophy and Literature in the English Renaissance.[36]
Awards and honors
1992: Best American Essays[37] for "Canon, Syllabus, List"[38]
^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.
