Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

Whereas these historical accounts are essential to understand the modern debate,
most of the crucial theoretical implications pertaining to the idea of literary canons as
they stand today are summed in John Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of
Literary Canon Formation and David H. Richter Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views
on Reading Literature. While the latter offers a comprehensible collection of essays
representing the varying perspectives on canon-formation and criteria that determine
literary value from renowned critics and scholars (such as Edward Said, Harold Bloom,
and Henry Louis Gates Jr.), Guillory challenges both the “traditionalists” and the
“populists” factions of the debate by resituating the problem of canon-formation in a new
theoretical framework drawn from a term first coined by Pierre Bourdieu 1 . For Guillory,
canons are “cultural capital” and the current debate should not be focused on so-called
“representative” and/or “aesthetical” values but on the various forces which regulate the
distribution and consumption of literary works. Guillory divides his book into three main
sections: "Critique" which discusses the issues surrounding the current canonical debate;
"Case Studies," divided into three chapters, which explains 1) how the inclusion of Gray
and Wordsworth in the vernacular canon displays the connection between the
"articulation of the school's institutional agendas with social struggles in the society at
large" (x); 2) how the rise of New Criticism resulted in the canonization of the moderns
and the revaluing of the metaphysical poets; and 3) how literary theory has become the
authority in the attribution of stock value to literary works by regulating the distribution
of cultural capital within the institutional curriculum. For the purposes of this study and
1 In “The Forms of Capital,” Bourdieu develops the notion of capital beyond its strict economic conception
to include "immaterial" and "non-economic" forms of capital, specifically cultural and symbolic capital, as
they become subjected to various forms of exchanges and transactions.
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