New Books in Language

John Guillory (NYU English author of the pathbreaking Cultural Capital) is here to discuss his amazing new Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (U Chicago Press, 2022)

He speaks with John and with Nick Dames, co-editor of Public Books, Professor of Humanities at Columbia and most recently author of The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton 2023). The gap between criticism and scholarship looms large, as does the utility of Panofsky's 1940 distinction between "monuments" and "documents." they ask what sorts of cultural documents achieve aesthetic memorability, for good or for ill.

Mentioned in the episode:

• W. B Yeats, "Monuments of unageing intellect"; a line from "Sailing to Byzantium" (1933).
• George Eliot, in Middlemarch (1871-2): "Would it not be rash to conclude that there was no passion behind those [Samuel Daniels] sonnets to Delia which strike us [nowadays] as the thin music of a mandolin?"
• Hannah Arendt, Lectures of Kant's Political Philosophy (1982) on judgment, and how general categories can be brought to bear on particulars.
• Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)
• Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (1954; John has a short "B-Side" appreciation in Public Books).
• Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism
• Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction
• Alvin Gouldner , The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979)

Listen and Read here.

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