Cultural Capital

"Since its initial publication in 1993, John Guillory's Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the compilation and codification of what was once known, unassailably, as the literary canon. Cultural Capital challenges the putative objectivity of aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and literary knowledge on which "culture" had long been based. Now, as the "crisis of the canon" has evolved into the "crisis of humanities," Guillory's groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more relevant and urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this new edition: "Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation-these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.""--