Papers by John David Guillory
Textual Practice, 2021
ABSTRACT This essay offers an account of the ongoing exchange between Marshall McLuhan and Walter... more ABSTRACT This essay offers an account of the ongoing exchange between Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong, S.J. in the context of their shared interest in the print revolution of the early modern period, as well as their common embrace of Catholic theology. Ong did his Master’s thesis under McLuhan’s direction, and at his teacher’s suggestion, went on to write a dissertation at Harvard on the figure of the Protestant philosopher, Petrus Ramus, published as Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue in 1958. McLuhan’s work on media and the print revolution in the nineteen-fifties culminated in The Gutenberg Galaxy, his breakthrough study of 1962, which I argue is in some respects a response to Ong’s study of Ramus. After the convergence of their interest in the nineteen-fifties, however, Ong rejected the concept of ‘medium,’ focusing instead on the problem of ‘orality and literacy.’ This divergence, I further argue, was deeply rooted in the different ways that Ong and McLuhan assimilated Catholic theology. For Ong, McLuhan’s commitment to the transformative possibilities of media implied a residually Protestant orientation of his thought, a reformism that Ong believed was incompatible with orthodox Catholic theology.
Critical Inquiry, 1983
... or Dante did, the truths of his age.'4 The absence of a modern classic reflects ... more ... or Dante did, the truths of his age.'4 The absence of a modern classic reflects not an ... I am arguing, then, that Eliot's description of a "Church within the Church" describes nothing but ... culture has aspired to canonical consensus, an illusion reinforced by the cognitive silence of the ...
History of Humanities
In this essay, I argue for a reorientation of discourse about the humanities to the objects of hu... more In this essay, I argue for a reorientation of discourse about the humanities to the objects of humanistic study rather than claims for their value or effect. Returning to an essay Erwin Panofsky published in 1940, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," I build on Panofsky's rich distinction between "monuments" and "documents" as the two sides of the humanistic object of study. By "monuments," Panofsky refers to all of those human artifacts, actions, or ideas that have urgent meaning for us in the present. By "document," he refers to all of those traces or records by means of which we recover monuments. Monuments and documents bring the long time of human existence, past or future, into relation to the short time of human life, a relation that defines the objects of study in all the humanities and confirms the undeniable interest of that study. And for short time an endlesse moniment.-Edmund Spenser, "Epithalamion" I f there is one feature that most recent discussions of the humanities have in common, it is surely the rhetorical form of the defense. The prevalence of defense suggestsnot without evidence-that the humanities are under attack and have been perhaps since their inception. Perennially declared to be in a state of crisis, the humanities seem to have emerged as university disciplines by a different route than the natural and social sciences, both earlier than these disciplines and left over after the sciences achieved preeminence at the turn of the twentieth century. This is the view of the historian, Lawrence Veysey, who writes that what we call the humanities were in fact "what was left" after the social sciences separated from the American Council of Learned Societies and formed their own organization, the Social Science Research Council, in
Critical Inquiry, 1983
... or Dante did, the truths of his age.'4 The absence of a modern classic reflects ... more ... or Dante did, the truths of his age.'4 The absence of a modern classic reflects not an ... I am arguing, then, that Eliot's description of a "Church within the Church" describes nothing but ... culture has aspired to canonical consensus, an illusion reinforced by the cognitive silence of the ...
Profession, 2002
164 The occasion of this paper, the change in scope of the MLA Bibliography to include more fully... more 164 The occasion of this paper, the change in scope of the MLA Bibliography to include more fully the teaching of language, rhetoric, and literature, is very welcome and surely to be celebrated by members of our profession. But as I have been asked to represent the teachers of literature in responding to this occasion, I feel compelled to mix
Profession, 2002
164 The occasion of this paper, the change in scope of the MLA Bibliography to include more fully... more 164 The occasion of this paper, the change in scope of the MLA Bibliography to include more fully the teaching of language, rhetoric, and literature, is very welcome and surely to be celebrated by members of our profession. But as I have been asked to represent the teachers of literature in responding to this occasion, I feel compelled to mix
Modern Language Quarterly, 1997
And this is that famous human freedom which everyone brags of having, and which consish only in t... more And this is that famous human freedom which everyone brags of having, and which consish only in this: that men are conscious of their appetite and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.-Spinoza Plus qa change.. . Of the several reasons one might offer for the belated reception of Pierre Bourdieu's work in the U.S. academy-the uncertainties of translation, the difference of the French intellectual scene, the discrepancy between the publication order of his books in France and in the United States, the notorious difficulty of his prose-none explains the suspicion, even hostility, with which his work has often been greeted. Surveying the most typical misapprehensions of Bourdieu's theoretical positions, Loic Wacquant reminds us, much in the spirit of Bourdieu, that the reception of any foreign oeuvre is mediated by "structures of the national intellectual field."' The interesting question raised by this point is why the same field that permitted so favorable a reception of Derrida or Foucault, especially in the humanities, should have occasioned so different a response to Bourdieu. Wacquant observes in concluding his study that the severity of Bourdieu's "reflexive sociology," which spares neither itself nor any other intellectual project exposure to the cold illumination of its analysis, provokes intense uneasiness among his readers. This uneasiness must be very great indeed, if the same readers who assimilated poststructuralist thought without being too disturbed by what some consider to be its "nihilism" find Bourdieu altogether too bleak. Yet even this account Wacquant, "Bourdieu in America: Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory," in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, igg3), 246.
MELUS, 1996
JOHN GUILLORY CULTURAL CAPITAL The Problem Of Literary mon Formation In Cultural Capital, John Gu... more JOHN GUILLORY CULTURAL CAPITAL The Problem Of Literary mon Formation In Cultural Capital, John Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical frame-work. The result is a ...
Critical Quarterly, 1991
is the work that confers upon him [Sir John Denham] the rank and dignity of an original author. H... more is the work that confers upon him [Sir John Denham] the rank and dignity of an original author. He seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape to be poetically descriied, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation. * Meantime you gain the height, from whose fair brow The bursting prospect spreads immense around; And, snatched o'er hill and dale, and wood and lawn, And verdant field, and darkening heath between, And villages embosomed soft in trees, And spiry towns by surging columns marked Of household smoke, your eye excursive roams-Wide-stretching from the Hall in whose kind haunt The hospitable Genius lingers still, To where the broken landscape, by degrees Ascending, roughens into rigid hills ,. .
Critical Inquiry, 2002
The sciences are small power, because not eminent, and therefore, not acknowledged in any man....... more The sciences are small power, because not eminent, and therefore, not acknowledged in any man.... For science is of that nature, as none can understand it to be, but such as in a good measure have attained it.-THOMAS HOBBES, Leviathan
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Papers by John David Guillory