Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation by Professor John Guillory

Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation Reviews

• 
  Lawrence

  I spent a LONG time with this book, trying to understand it very thoroughly, because it felt incredibly useful and important to the core reasons I am interested in the things I am trying to do with my dissertation. It's... not the easiest book to read, but I'm glad I didn't try to get by with just the introduction and some reviews. In a lot of ways, I felt like this book could have been written today.
  
  These quotes were my key takeaways:
  • “in fact 'aesthetic value' is nothing more or other than cultural capital." (332)
  • “The fact of class determines whether and how individuals gain access to the means of literary production, and the system regulating such access is a much more efficient mechanism of social exclusion than acts of judgment.” (Ix)
  ⁃ “the mode of consumption demanded by the products of restricted production offered to the dominant classes a more reliable means of restricting access to the work of art than the mechanism of price itself. This was a consequence of the fact that the mode of consumption appropriate to the objects of restricted pro-/duction assumed the possession of the cultural capital provided by a particular kind of education … as cultural works recede into the past, they simultaneously gravitate into the realm of 'restricted production'... by virtue of the fact that the knowledge required to decipher them is the cultural capital of the school." (329-330)
  • “The most politically strategic argument for revising the canon remains the argument that the works so revalued are important and valuable cultural works. If literary critics are not yet in a position to recognize the inevitability of the social practice of judgment, that is a measure of how far the critique of the canon still is from developing a sociology of judgment. The theory of cultural capital elaborated in this book is an attempt to construct just such a sociology.” (Xiv)
  • "In a culture of such universal access, canonical works could not be experienced as they so often are, as lifeless monuments, or as proofs of class distinction. Insofar as the debate on the canon has tended to discredit aesthetic judgment, or to express a certain embarrassment with its metaphysical pretensions and its political biases, it has quite missed the point. The point is not to make judgment disappear but to reform the conditions of its practice. If there is no way out of the game of culture, then, even when cultural capital is the only kind of capital, there may be another kind of game, with less dire consequences for the losers, an aesthetic game. Socializing the means of production and consumption would be the condition of an aestheticism unbound, not its overcoming." (340)
  • “The professional-managerial class has made the correct assessment that, so far as its future profit is concerned, the reading of great works is not worth the investment of very much time or money. The perceived devaluation of the humanities curriculum is in reality a decline in its market value." (46)
  • “If literary criticism is ever to conceptualize a new disciplinary domain, it will have to undertake first a much more thorough reflection on the historical category of literature; otherwise I suggest that new critical movements will continue to register their agendas symptomatically, by ritually overthrowing a continually resurgent literariness and literary canon. At the same time it is unquestionably the case that the several recent crises of the literary canon—its 'opening’ to philosophical works, to works by minorities, and now to popular and mass cultural works--amounts to a terminal crisis, more than sufficient evidence of the urgent need to reconceptualize the object of literary study.” (265)
• 
  Kenny

  dense but professionally useful - talks about the critique of the canon debates - particularly that between the Classics/Great Books/Western-focus and the more liberal-pluralist/representative school (primarily the inclusion of a women's studies)
• 
  Tim Lacy

  I've read Aquinas, Aristotle, Derrida, Plotinus, etc., but this is one of the toughest books I've ever completed. Other reviewers have noted the difficulty of the prose. That is indeed a factor. But it's also about the difficulty of the topic and underlying influences. Another factor is cultural capital, a topic covered from many different angles by its founder, Pierre Bourdieu. - TL
• 
  Chris

  It might be interesting to think about how reviews on Goodreads would fit into Guillory's ideas about cultural capital. Do we read and review to establish and display our own cultural capital? When I have an encounter with literary criticism or theory of any kind, I often experience a passing intoxication, both for the ideas presented and the ideas that are inspired in my head by the pursuit of meaning in the text. But in the end the barnacles and kelp that passes for style in the humanities leaves me with a hangover and a sense that ideas are being obscured by the display put on by the style. The style of the academic writer is, no doubt, the very badge of the professional, only learned through years of reading and imitation, and only through that style can the academic writer display their full attainment of cultural capital, which is apparently more important than displaying their ideas plainly.
  
  Some interesting ideas but you will have to work harder than you should have to to dig them out.
  Recommended only for those who see a future career in the fields of literary criticism and theory.
• 
  Rebekah

  His prose style is a little dense, but the information is worth getting to. Also a foundational text for cultural studies.
• 
  Allison

  Difficult read, but made me think.
• 
  Nestorio De Chavez

  nice