Cultural Capital

“Cultural Capital has become a stealth classic. . . . The canon, Guillory argued, wasn’t an impregnable monument, but an imaginary construct that had always been contested.” * New York Times *
“Guillory is the profession’s great disenchanter. He came to prominence with his landmark study Cultural Capital . . . a brilliant act of desublimation aimed at an earlier crisis of authority in the humanities, often referred to as the ‘canon wars.’” * The Nation *
“Cultural Capital is one of the most admired and influential studies in the humanities in recent decades. The hallmark of Guillory’s work has been to engage with, but stand back from, the issues roiling contemporary academic debates, setting them in a longer historical perspective and bringing a form of distanced, sociologically informed theory to their analysis.” * London Review of Books *
“A brilliantly iconoclastic exploration of the current state of literary criticism.” * The Review of English Studies *
“Cultural Capital is a distinctive contribution to the ubiquitous discussion of the ‘crisis’ in the humanities. Neither jeremiad nor apology, Guillory’s book is a densely reasoned sociological analysis of literary canon formation.” * Modernism/modernity *
“The suppleness of the book's argument overall places Guillory just where it feels right to be. He does not argue for the demolition of the canon or for the abandonment of aesthetic judgment; he advocates, rather, a struggle to disjoin the study of literature from markers of class prestige and to open up universal access to it.” * Modern Fiction Studies *
“Cultural Capital is a rich book. It rewards the reader with original and often surprising interpretations of buried structural relations of exclusion that are objectified in the canon debate… Guillory is concerned about who reads and who writes; he is also concerned about for whom writers write and under what conditions.” * South Atlantic Review *
“Cultural Capital takes possession of the whole familiar canon debate and transforms it into something rich and strange, new and exciting.” * English Literature in Transition *
“Not merely an intelligent voice in the canon debate, Guillory is among a short list of authors… who have provided the signal service of helping us in the academy to understand in a profound way the function in society as a whole of the institution we serve. . . . Guillory places the canon wars in the context of the social changes that, he argues, have produced the current crisis of the humanities.” * College Literature *
“The signature of Cultural Capital… consists in the close attention Guillory pays to the institutional and pedagogic underpinnings of literary critical and theoretical programmes.” * Cultural Studies *