Nicholas Dames & John Plotz at Public Books:
John Guillory is an award-winning teacher and scholar. His varied and influential work includes Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (Columbia University Press, 1983) and the field-transforming Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (University of Chicago Press, 1993). His brilliant new book, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, argues that modern literary study remains anxious about the century-old professionalism that betrays the discipline’s relation to its amateur precursor, criticism. He discusses it here with John Plotz of Brandeis and Public Book’s coeditor in chief, Nicholas Dames. Dames is author of such prize-winning books as Amnesiac Selves (Oxford University Press, 2001) and The Physiology of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 2007), and most recently The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2023).
A longer version of this interview aired recently on Recall This Book, a podcast partnered with Public Books.
More here.