Guillory, John. Cultural Capital:
The Problem of Literary Canon
Formation.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
Summary by Sarah K. Wilson
Chapter 1:
Canonical and Noncanonical: The Current Debate
Recently, schools have expanded the canon and met great conservative
criticism as a result. The expanded
canon intended to give “representation” to all groups of people
and not just the majority culture (5).
Historically, minorities have been excluded from the curriculum (6).
But, Guillory argues, a pluralist curriculum cannot create a pluralist
university or society (8). It is assumed that works that are not
included in a syllabus are intentionally EXcluded; Guillory argues that instead,
a syllabus is made through the process of selection (based on several criteria)
and not of exclusion (9, 33).
There
is much more to canonicity than an author’s social identification
(15). For example, it has
traditionally been believed that female and minority authors were excluded from
the literary canon (and curriculum).
Guillory argues that these seeming exclusions were not so sexist and
racist as they may seem. Rather,
they were not INcluded for viable
social and historical reasons.
These social groups had little access to literacy and therefore wrote
much less in proportion to white males (15). Today, women authors have been discovered as a result of
research programs and should be studied in schools for their historical value
but by doing so, must not necessarily become canonical authors (15-16).
Guillory
claims that both sides of the canon debate seem to agree on three points that
he then rebuts: 1) “canonical texts are the repositories of cultural
value”-- but school culture is different from and doesn’t affect
national culture (22, 38); 2) “the selection of texts is the selection of
values” -- but there are other selection techniques (such as genre,
linguistics) which may play a bigger part in selection (23); and 3)
“value must be either intrinsic or extrinsic” -- but value is
contingent person to person and not able to be judged absolutely by a community
(26-27).
Guillory
says of the canon: “Changing the syllabus cannot mean in any historical
context overthrowing the canon, because every construction of a syllabus institutes once again the process of canon
formation” (31). But in
choosing a syllabus, schools should not seek to read works which represent
minorities but that are “important and significant cultural works”
no matter of the author (52). He
states: “In the present regime of capital distribution, the school will
remain both the agency for the reproduction of unequal social relations and a
necessary site for the critique of that system” (55).
In
terms of literary selection, Guillory states: “Canonicity is not a property
of the work itself, but of its transmission, its relation to other works in a
collection of works -- the syllabus in its instructional locus, the
school” (55). With the rise
of the middle class, vernacular became an accepted form of literary language
and where “literature” once meant only writing in a “literary
language,” it became more inclusive (69, 75). This shift meant that people no longer needed to read
“literature” to learn the literary, upscale language and literature
lost its “linguistic capital” which largely determines its cultural
capital (81).
Chapter 2:
Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon
The
fist chapter claimed “that there can be no general theory of canon formation that would
predict or account for the canonization of any particular work, without
specifying first the unique historical conditions of that work’s
production and reception. Neither
the social identity of the author nor the work’s proclaimed or tacit
ideological messages definitively explain canonical status” (85). This chapter looks a the specific
example of Gray’s Elegy.
As he shows, “It is rather in the relation between what the poem
means and what it formally embodies that we may understand its canonical
position” (86).
Gray’s
poem exhibits good composition, good use of genre (and the “right”
genre for the time period which valued poetry as literature), and common
vernacular (87-93). Thus, it
embodies the formal elements which lent to canonization. Also, the poem held meaning for the
culture -- it is a private and public poem (93). It reflects the ideals of the bourgeoisie and employs
vernacular in a time that it was becoming accepted and longed for in literature
by the rising middle class (93).
The vernacular was picked up by Wordsworth who felt it less artificial
(126).