Literature, commerce, and the spectacle of modernity, 1750-1800

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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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Yasmin Hussain

"Issues of cultural hybridity, diaspora and identity are central to debates on ethnicity and race and, over the past decade, have framed many theoretical debates in sociology, cultural studies and literary studies. However, these ideas are all too often considered at a purely theoretical level." "In this book Yasmin Hussain uses these ideas to explore cultural production by British South Asian women including Monica Ali, Meera Syal and Gurinder Chadha. Hussain provides a sociological analysis of the contexts and experiences of the British South Asian community, discussing key concerns that emerge within the work of this new generation of women writers and which express more widespread debates within the community. In particular these authors address issues of individual and group identity and the ways in which these are inflected by ethnicity and gender."--Jacket.

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Thomas Fink

"This study analyzes the work of social poets who hail from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and geographical locations in the United States. These figures, who emerged as poets in the last two decades, utilize a diversity of aesthetic strategies to address issues of in/visibility, the erasure and reconstruction of history, and issues of inclusivity and exclusivity in formations of community. Issues of community raised involve race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual preference."--BOOK JACKET.

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Kevin J.H. Dettmar

The literary world has in the past two decades celebrated the centenaries of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound, the three pillars of Anglo-American modernism. Only now, Kevin J.H. Dettmar contends, are we starting to appreciate "what was apparent to the Modernists all along - that the monuments of High Modernism already contained within them the seeds of their own de(con)struction." The contributors to Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism argue that we are in the midst of a critical paradigm shift. First literary critics greeted the birth of modernism with outrage, decrying its anarchy; then the New Critics sought to control it with interpretation. Today, critics are beginning to rediscover modernism's inherent anarchy, this time from the postmodernist perspective. The result is the emergence of a new way of reading - and writing about - modernism. The book collects essays by established scholars as well as fresh new voices that provide a variety of perspectives on modernism. The first section, "Inventing Modernism," shows how modernist writers worked together to craft a coherent identity; the second, "Modernist Aesthetics," critiques Lyotard and other theorists on the assumptions underlying modernist texts. In "Modernism and Mass Culture," we see how Stein, Lawrence, and Eliot reacted to a burgeoning mass culture, while "Rereading the New" provides postmodernist readings of Conrad, Woolf, and Djuna Barnes, as well as Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.