By the light

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John Guillory

In Cultural Capital, 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.". Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of representing social groups in the canon than of distributing "cultural capital" in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, the practices of reading and writing. He declines to reduce the history of canon formation to one of individual reputations or the ideological contents of particular works, arguing that a critique of the canon fixated on the concept of authorial identity overlooks historical transformations in the forms of cultural capital that have underwritten judgments of individual authors. The most important of these transformations is the emergence of "literature" in the later eighteenth century as the name of the cultural capital of the bourgeoisie. In three case studies, Guillory charts the rise and decline of the category of "literature" as the organizing principle of canon formation in the modern period. He considers the institutionalization of the English vernacular canon in eighteenth-century primary schools; the polemic on behalf of a New Critical modernist canon in the university; and the appearance of a "canon of theory" supplementing the literary curriculum in the graduate schools and marking the onset of a terminal crisis of literature as the dominant form of cultural capital in the schools. The final chapter of Cultural Capital examines recent theories of value judgment, which have strongly reaffirmed cultural relativism as the necessary implication of canon critique. Contrasting the relativist position with Pierre Bourdieu's very different sociology of judgment, Guillory concludes that the object of a revisionary critique of aesthetic evaluation should not be to discredit judgment, but to reform the conditions of its practice in the schools by universalizing access to the means of literary production and consumption.

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Sayre N. Greenfield

This book proposes that allegory is not a species of literature but a structure of reading applied to uncomfortable juxtapositions within literary texts. The interpretive careers of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and of the same figures in Spenser's Faerie Queene provide central examples to show not what these poems mean but how they may be read and what cultural conditions encourage allegorical or non-allegorical readings. Also encompassed here are interpretations of classical verse, Biblical parable, Jacobean masque, modern lyric, and television advertising in order to explore how texts move into and out of the category of allegory.

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Karen Newman

This compelling book uses 103 illustrations to argue that modes of visualizing science have profoundly determined "fetal politics" and the contemporary abortion debates. With its close interplay of visual and verbal texts, it traces both the history of fetal images from the sixteenth century onward (including the classic Life magazine photographs by Lennart Nilsson from 1965) and the consequences of how obstetrical and embryological knowledge was represented over time in Europe - to both specialists and the public - as medical knowledge came to be produced and understood through anatomical observation. Fetal Positions demonstrates the importance of history for framing and understanding contemporary political issues, and, by historicizing heterosexuality and reproduction, it contributes to the emerging study of the history of sexuality.

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Paul Rabinow

Making PCR is the fascinating, behind-the-scenes account of the invention of one of the most significant biotech discoveries of our time - the polymerase chain reaction. Skillfully blending narrative description and interviews with all the major players, Paul Rabinow explores what it means to be a "scientist" today, the effects of doing science in the high-risk, high-reward environment of biotech, and what a scientific discovery or invention is at a time when it is possible to patent life itself. PCR has profoundly transformed the practices and potential of molecular biology by extending scientists' ability to identify and manipulate genetic material. It facilitates the identification of precise segments of DNA and accurately reproduces millions of copies of the given segment in a short period of time. In sum, Making PCR shows how a contingently assembled practice emerged, composed of distinctive subjects, the site in which they worked, and the object they invented.