An analysis of the debate over the literary canon, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital (Chicago, 1993) was among the most widely cited and influential books published in the academic literary humanities in the 1990s: “the idea was to push the debate off the term ‘identity’, or social identity, and move it more in the direction of considering schools, institutions, language, the discourse of literature, the discourse of criticism.” In this recent interview, Guillory considers the impact that his book had and takes a look at the current state of the academic discipline of literary study. He also discusses what it was like to be a graduate student at Yale during the heyday of deconstruction and how his early Jesuitical training influenced his later, secular vocation as a critic.
