Join us Thursday, September 26 at 7 p.m.!
The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities will welcome acclaimed scholar John Guillory to 101 Archer to give a lecture about social capital.
Guillory is the Silver Professor of English at New York University. His interests span a wide array of topics, including Renaissance poetry and prose; Shakespeare; Milton; literature and science in the Renaissance; the history of rhetoric; the history of criticism; the sociology of literary study; and twentieth-century literary theory. As questions about canon revision rose to the surface of literary studies in the late ’80s and ’90s, his work Cultural Capital (1993) created buzz in the academic community, drawing all kinds of critical and celebratory responses.
Though Guillory has published widely since the nineties—particularly covering media history—his most recent book Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) gained national attention, receiving reviews in numerous professional journals as well as commercial presses like the New York Times and The New Yorker. The collection employs a sociological framework to tell the institutional history of university English departments and their role in the “crisis” of justification that all sorts of humanities departments face today. In keeping with this year’s theme of Space, Professing Criticism asks compelling questions about the discrete intellectual spaces that we call departments within the broader culture of campus life.
At 101 Archer, Guillory will look at Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to examine the purpose, workings, and pitfalls of social capital. This event is free and open to all. If you are interested in English, philosophy and political science, we think you’ll find Guillory’s scholarship especially stirring.
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