the minnesota review n.s. 61-62 (2004)

John Guillory with Jeffrey J. Williams

Toward a Sociology of Literature: An Interview with John Guillory

What's dead, white, and male? The canon, so a generation of literary critics concluded by the 1980s, and a great deal of their scholarship worked to recover writing by women, people of color and other excluded groups, and to refashion if not break the monopoly of the accepted canon. Traditionalists were appalled, proclaiming that Alice Walker was no Tolstoy and that such loosened gates augured the downhill slide of Western civilization.

John Guillory's Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (U of Chicago P, 1993), one of the most influential critical books of the 1990s, shifted the terms of debate from the abstract aesthetic value of literature to the social uses of literature. In particular, it looked at the "cultural capital" (a term drawn from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) that the canon accrued for those undergoing higher education. Guillory diagnosed the problem as literature's no longer holding a central place in the enculturation of the middle class; one no longer had to quote Shakespeare to be a banker. Instead, literary theory had supplanted the role of high literature in marking those with cultural capital, though it was a capital negotiable primarily in graduate schools. Since Cultural Capital, Guillory has developed his sociological frame to look at other facets of literary study, including the position of graduate students in a well-known essay, "Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want" (ADE Bulletin 113 [1996]; rpt. Profession 96) and in "The System of Graduate Education" (PMLA 11 [2000]), and the early history of the formation of English from rhetoric, philology, and belles lettres, to culminate in a book, Literary Study in the Age of the New Class.

John Guillory was born and raised in New Orleans. After undergraduate education at Tulane (BA, 1974), he undertook graduate study at Yale (PhD, 1980) during the heyday of the Yale School but, as he remarks here, kept his distance from its enthrallment with deconstruction. There he was trained as a Renaissance scholar; his first book, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (Columbia UP, 1983), stemming from his dissertation under the direction of John Hollander, began his consideration of the processes of literary history and the canon. He taught at Yale from 1979 to 1989, moving to Johns Hopkins as professor of English in 1989. Through the early 1990s he became a leading expositor of Bourdieu for U.S. literary studies in Cultural Capital and in essays such as "Literary Critics as Intellectuals: Class Analysis and the Crisis of the Humanities" (in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael Gilmore [Columbia UP, 1994]) and "Bourdieu's Refusal" (MLQ 58 [1997]). Over the past decade, he has turned to consider the general history of the discipline, in essays such as "Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines" (in Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente [Princeton UP, 2002]), "The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism" (Critical Inquiry 28 [2002]), and "The Memo and Modernity" (Critical Inquiry 30 [2004]). He has also continued to write on early modern poetry and prose, in articles such as "Gray's Elegy, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and the Vernacular Canon" (in Early Modern Conceptions of Poetry, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves [Routledge, 1995]), "Milton, Narcissism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male Self-Esteem" (in Collected Essays on Milton, ed. Christopher Kendrick [G.K. Hall, 1995]), "'To Please the Wiser Sort': Violence, Philosophy, and Hamlet" (in Psychoanalysis, Historicism and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor [Routledge, 2000]), "The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading" (in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber [Routledge, 2000]), and "The Kingdom of the Bachelors: Bacon's New Atlantis" (forthcoming in Politics and the Passions, ed. Victoria Kahn [Princeton UP, 2005]). In 1997 he moved from Hopkins to Harvard, but settled at NYU in 1999, where he is currently chair of English.

This interview took place in John Guillory's book-filled office at NYU in Manhattan on 28 April 2004. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams, editor of minnesota review, and transcribed by Jason Arthur, editorial assistant for the review and a doctoral student at University of Missouri.

Williams: Most people know your work through Cultural Capital. Indeed, it was a big book, stamping an endpoint to some of the debate about the canon. As I take it, you deliberately shifted the terrain from saying one book is better than another to the social function of literature in producing cultural capital. What is your retrospective take on it?

Guillory: This is the "ten-years-after" comment. Obviously I was trying to push the debate on to different questions; the idea was to push the debate off the term "identity," or social identity, and move it more in the direction of considering schools, institutions, language, the discourse of literature, the discourse of criticism. I wanted to bring all of those terms into the debate—not to end the debate itself, or to end discussion of the historical process of canon formation, which I believed and continue to believe is a lively subject for consideration. I'm interested in the history of literature, the history of the book, and how certain works rise and fall.

I wanted to bring in these other terms about the driving force of canonization, at least up to the point in the later twentieth century when the discourse of social identity emerged by way of reflection on the relation of literary criticism to the new social movements. I thought those identity concepts were the wrong terms for thinking about the long history of canon formation, because they emerged only at the end of a long historical process. That way of thinking about canon formation and the history of literature in relation to the category of social identity had actually effaced the real historical conditions for that process.

Williams: Which were?

Guillory: Which had to do with phenomena like vernacularization, the way in which language became stratified around the distinction between those who read and those who do not read, however fuzzy the line between the two. So the history of literacy was, for me, a set of historical conditions that more immediately pressured the process of canonization than was the social identity of writers, who were always, prior to a certain point, presumptively male. But why presumptively male? This had to do, in my view, less with the process of judging works than with the disposition of literacy as a form of cultural capital. So I just wanted to reframe the debate in that way.

At this point, it's not so much the reframing of the debate that matters—although I am disappointed that issues like the history of literacy haven't become more important. I would like more work to be done on that. The subject of canon formation has become part of the background of criticism; it's hard to bring it back into the foreground, given that much of the archival work, with regard to recovering writers in the past whose social identities were minority identities (women, other ethnicities, and so forth) has been done. The subject has exhausted itself and seems to be less interesting than it was. So I hope that when people read Cultural Capital now, it is not read for its intervention into an ongoing debate about whether or not we should understand canon formation as a matter of social identity, and the marginalization of persons with some particular social identity, but rather for the other aspects of the book that entered into the argument along the way—literacy, aesthetics, the relation of aesthetics to political economy. These are topics that might have appeared, in the moment in which the debate was most heated, as auxiliary.

Williams: I'm curious about how you read the fate of theory in that book. It seems to me the real innovation of the book, and the difference from a lot of other books, especially from your cohort, is that it calls for a sociology of literature. You bring Bourdieu onto the scene of American criticism. Derrida and the deconstructionists were the master critics of the 80s, and in a way you argued for a shift from them. What constitutes the sociology of literature and how did it respond to the scene you were embedded in?

Guillory: I might approach your question best by way of my reading of Bourdieu. I actually worked out a lot of the argument before I started seriously reading Bourdieu. I worked it out in the process of writing an early essay that I published in Critical Inquiry on T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks. It was becoming evident to me that what was missing from the canon debate was a set of terms that would bring the debate's category of social identity onto relation to a concept of social groups defined in the way that sociology defines such groups (that is, in terms of status or class). I was headed in that direction, so the encounter with Bourdieu was fortuitous because it gave me an enormous body of work in which this had been elaborated with far greater resources than I had.

Williams: You don't have many tables in Cultural Capital!

Guillory: Well, Bourdieu had a stable of research workers who helped him with Distinction and a lot of his other books. He also focused mainly on contemporary French culture. But, as I was saying, the encounter with Bourdieu was fortuitous because it gave me a set of terms that I could appropriate without, I hoped, simply "applying" Bourdieu to a particular problem. The term "cultural capital" I had already gotten from Alvin Gouldner. It was his formulation in his analysis of the professional-managerial class that was really the formative moment for me in making the sociological turn.

Williams: You draw on Gouldner a lot in the essay on "Literary Critics as Intellectuals" in Rethinking Class.

Guillory: Right, especially the famous Gouldner book, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. The "new class" was a notion that has stuck with me and that I'm still working with. Gouldner's context was very American, whereas Bourdieu's context was French and much more difficult to assimilate. So, even though I think that part of the agenda of Cultural Capital seemed to be to bring Bourdieu into the domain of an Anglo-American discipline that has a canon of French theorists—to bring him in as an upsetting French theorist, who had had famous quarrels with Derrida and Foucault on very interesting issues relating to sociology and philosophy and what sociologists have to offer to philosophers or in opposition to philosophers—I didn't realize that that was going to be taken as one of the main agendas, if not the main agenda, of Cultural Capital, beyond simply addressing, in that heated moment, the issue of canon formation that had been, in my view, too narrowly defined.

So it was a little surprising for me to come out at the end of it as the champion of Bourdieu. I hoped to have a much wider conception of sociology, and a possible sociology of literature and sociology of literary study, than might be gotten from Bourdieu. That was one reason I was careful in the last chapter to demarcate my difference with Bourdieu around the concept of the aesthetic, which is a quarrel I have with Distinction, the book that crossed the Atlantic first and branded Bourdieu as a different, sociological critic of the category of the aesthetic and the category of taste. I considered myself to be someone who was absorbing, either tacitly or explicitly—more tacitly with Weber or Simmel, more explicitly with Gouldner—a range of sociological approaches to culture.

Williams: Your chapter on de Man is very persuasive when you talk about charismatic authority, in particular drawing on Weber. In a sense, what you said before about identity and about Cultural Capital's being a critique of identity politics is similar to some of Walter Benn Michaels' arguments about identity politics. I hadn't thought of this connection before, but you were a colleague of his for a number of years at Hopkins. Although your work is very different, you both say we should talk less about identity and more about class. And although you talk about class a lot, you are careful to say that your politics aren't Marxist.

Guillory: My relation to the subject was very different from Walter's, although I recognize that we share a swerve away from identity politics—with all the qualifications you have to insert when you say you're dissociating yourself from identity politics, namely, that its causes are just. Walter has produced a similar sort of swerve, but he has always been more celebratory of what he describes than I am. He seems almost to celebrate the gamelike quality of the social system in a way that I stop well short of doing. I do decline to adopt a preachy tone about such things as the maldistribution of capital, cultural or economic. It's easy to be critical of that; it's clever to seem to celebrate it.

Actually that's probably more complimentary to myself than I should be and less complimentary to Walter than I should be. He has a way of conveying the message, "Let's lighten up academic styles of linking scholarship to political agendas," whereas I think that I take the relation between politics and the social utterly seriously. I want to sort these things out so that we have a proper understanding of what these relations are and proceed from there. Academics should do what academics can do best.

Williams: One complaint that can be made about your work is that you stop short of politics, whether it be the job market or other things. But in the piece on intellectuals you mention that we should seize the opportunity to speak positively in public venues.

Guillory: Right. They don't come very frequently and I think those who have gifts of that sort and have something to say should take the opportunity when it comes. But I was referring in that essay to a certain kind of academic who has crossed over successfully into the public domain, in circumstances that are very unique and difficult to make pervasive or widely available in the profession. The best example would be Edward Said. It isn't clear that we can all do that, that we either have the gifts to do that or the opportunity.

Williams: It's also one's institutional purchase.

Guillory: Absolutely. If you're at Columbia or Harvard, you have an institutional purchase that people at other sorts of institutions simply do not have.

Williams: To come back to the question of your sociological turn, I take it as a concerted choice against the previous generation of theorists. You write in a serious, dispassionate, scholarly tone, but one of the few slightly spiky comments that I came across was in a footnote in the intellectuals essay about Derrida, where you said something like, "Derrida seems to have just discovered instrumental rationality." And you have the long chapter about discipleship to de Man in Cultural Capital. Deconstruction was the dominant mode of American criticism when you came into the field, so in what way were you responding to it?

Guillory: Derrida and de Man would require two different answers. I think I can say more about that question just by situating myself in relation to American deconstruction. And then I have to say something about my intellectual formation, so here's my Yale background.

Williams: When did you go to Yale?

Guillory: I started in 1974. I was at Tulane from 70 to 74. I finished at Yale in 79-80.

Williams: And de Man had just gotten there in 1970.

Guillory: He came with a reputation, not so much based on his writing as on his power as a teacher. So I was there at a moment in which a generation of very smart students were quite overwhelmed by the master theorists who arrived and made Yale what seemed then to be the center of the critical universe. I read everyone at the time. I never took a class with Paul de Man, because I didn't want to be seduced into the kind of discipleship I described in Cultural Capital. I found him an incredibly seductive writer; he has an extraordinary prose style, which is compelling to me even today. (I can say that, having taught de Man only yesterday in a graduate seminar.) I didn't take a class with him, and was very put off by the phenomenon of discipleship as I experienced it at Yale. I was thinking about it as a phenomenon and was trying to understand it very early on.

My sense of myself as a literary critic was very uncertain. I knew that there was a prevailing model of intellectual formation, in which you attached yourself mainly to one person. I was probably more influenced, in practice, by Herald Bloom, because intertextuality was the subject I was working on. It most energized me when I was in graduate school, and I ended up writing a dissertation on Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and the influence of Spenser and Shakespeare on Milton. Bloom's terms and way of thinking about that were much more important to me than de Man's rhetorical reading.

Williams: I assume Poetic Authority is from your dissertation.

Guillory: Right. I was interested in the way authority itself was created by the annexation of text to a tradition. You created your work, but you annexed it to a tradition and it accumulates authority from that annexation.

Williams: "Annexation" is a variant on influence.

Guillory: It also keeps it from sounding like a Bloomian study, but it was close to Bloom's way of looking at literary history. Hence I looked at de Man and de Manian discipleship from the outside. For me de Man was really the main line of deconstruction; this is what was coming out of Yale, even though Derrida had immense influence. Yet de Man's version of whatever one meant by deconstruction was more normative and in a way more American. American deconstruction was coming not out of philosophy departments but out of literature departments; it was becoming a way of reading both philosophy and literature. It was really de Man who was establishing the protocols for that practice, which he called "rhetorical reading," and which was already half there with techniques of close reading. Which isn't to say that de Manian deconstruction was just a version of close reading, because it did have an elaborate philosophical agenda built on top of it.

Williams: Which in part accounts for his success: he was assimilable or annexable to American practices, but also brought in a certain conceptual depth from Continental philosophy.

Guillory: Right. Even though there were certain formulations that were crucial to what deconstruction meant in America in the 1980s, Derrida was much less imitable. He was also constantly changing. There is a way in which de Man is consistent.

I should say that I also feel very nostalgic about that time, because everyone did seem to be, and for the most part were, very smart. Being smart was a value—what you could say and how cleverly you could say it.

Williams: My essay in this issue is called "Smart," about what you might call the cultural capital of that word within academe.

Guillory: Well, "smartness" was a value at the time, but I wanted to be on the outside of that culture, which was more of a visceral reaction to a mode of discipleship. As an ex-Catholic coming to Yale where there was a reigning dogma, I was disposed to be skeptical. Only later did I have a sense of how to critique that dogma, how to produce an analysis in such a way that I could defend my distance from it as principled and thought out.

Williams: Who else did you work with at Yale?

Guillory: I took classes with the usual figures—J. Hillis Miller, Martin Price, Leslie Brisman. I started doing my dissertation with Bart Giamatti and after Giamatti became President of the university, finished with John Hollander.

Williams: How do you see yourself in relation to your own generation or cohort of critics?

Guillory: If you're talking about the 80s, I certainly "betrayed" my cohort in the sense that I didn’t sign on for what was then the liveliest thing going—that is, deconstructive theory. I did sign on, as much as I was capable of in the later 80s, to new historicism as an agenda, since that was coming first out of Renaissance work, like Greenblatt's. I was interested in figuring out how to do that. It didn't actually work for me and I don't think I quite succeeded in transforming myself into a new historicist. The work that I've done since then in the Renaissance has been historicist, but it's gone off in a different direction and differs methodologically from new historicism.

Putting myself back in the state of mind I was in during the 80s, still at Yale and surrounded by the great master theorists but not wanting to do what they were doing, having written a book on the concept of poetic authority and interested in ways of thinking about how figures acquire authority, it seemed to me that a way to push this line of thought further was to engage an emergent alternative to deconstruction, the canon critique. Authority and canonization are two ways of looking at the same phenomenon—authority immanently and canon formation transcendentally, from the standpoint of social conditions. So I took up the term "cultural capital" when I started to read Gouldner and Bourdieu, also E. R. Curtius and Auerbach on Latin literature and the history of the dissemination of Latin in the West. Some things started to come together and I realized I had a way of talking about the canon debate that brought a lot of things into it that one wouldn't expect to find there.

I recognized that the process of canon formation didn't just describe works of literature and the social conditions of works of literature. There had also emerged, over against the literary canon, a canon of theory. This canon was much more rigid and exclusive in the principles of its formation than the literary canon, which looks by comparison fairly open. There was clearly a way in which, within institutional contexts, canons were functional imaginary constructions, organizing ways for thinking. I could re-understand my own experience of deconstruction at Yale and the dissemination of deconstruction in America by linking it to the term canonization. How would you have predicted that a book like Cultural Capital would have a chapter on Eliot and Brooks, but also a chapter on de Man? You couldn't have predicted that, but when I go back now I understand that it was a combination of interests pushing me towards some things and away from others that produced this set of terms and problematics.

Williams: How did it come to pass that you did Renaissance literature?

Guillory: I had a pretty good general education at Tulane, not otherwise a top-notch school, but there were very good teachers of Renaissance literature at Tulane. I came to Yale intending to do Renaissance literature. That's still my field. I was so to speak deflected from that field into the canon debate. I was deflected from the career trajectory that most people follow—a single period concentration—though I've continued to work in the Renaissance and publish essays, mostly on Milton but recently on Shakespeare and Bacon, and I usually teach in the Renaissance. I'm also writing a book on the figure of the philosopher and the name "philosophy" in Renaissance writing. It appears in lots and lots of texts in very interesting and puzzling ways. So I am still just as much a Renaissance scholar as a theorist, perhaps more the former.

I think a better description of what I do in theory would be a sociology of literary studies. That's usually how I describe what I do, with the caveat that I would have to call it "wild sociology," on the analogy of Freud, because I don't claim to be a sociologist in the fully disciplinary sense. I'm trying to appropriate certain sociological paradigms as self-consciously and carefully as I can to make sense of the history of literary studies.

Williams: I've gone through several of your recent articles, which, I assume, are pieces of a book on the history of the discipline, from the eighteenth century division between moral and natural philosophy to the present division between culture and science. As I take it, it's a general history, similar to Graff's Professing Literature, but you’re attempting a longer history, going back to the roots in rhetoric and belles lettres.

Guillory: Yes, the book I'm doing now is both a prehistory of literary study and a study of its evolution as a university discipline. It's not so much, as was Cultural Capital, an intervention into a debate of the moment. Yet I do have short chapters appended to the long historical narrative, which take up some issues of the moment, for example the relation between the composition professoriate and the literary professoriate and the origins of cultural studies in the decline of high theory. I hope to shed some light on controversies of the moment by setting them in relation to the long history of the disciplines.

The book is a sociologically-informed (I hope), narrative history, very different from Graff, in being based not on the conflict narrative but on discipline formation, the history of the university as an institution, and the university's relation to it changing constituencies. I'm referring to the long-term transition from an aristocratic and clerical clientele to the professional managerial class, where credentialization is the most important thing. The modern university leaves many old disciplines behind. Rhetoric, for example, goes back to antiquity; moral philosophy goes back to the Renaissance; philology, to the eighteenth century. Depending upon the name of the discourse of knowledge you're talking about, you have different points of origin and rupture in the forms of knowledge transmitted in the university. Moral philosophy, for example, is not really a discipline. Philology, on the other hand, becomes a discipline in the nineteenth century, and later in the century the basis for department formation. In the later nineteenth century we get departments of English or French. The emphasis was obviously on language; the method of study was philological.

I'm trying to figure out and to describe an aboriginal incoherence in discipline formation generally, but the discipline of literary studies in particular. We have to understand disciplines as having prehistories going back beyond the emergence of disciplines and departments in the university system in the tripartite system we have today, with its division of disciplines into humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Beyond that, we have to recognize the extracurricular forms in which knowledge is being produced about any number of subjects.

One of the things I'm trying to understand is how we end up with a discipline in which several different things are fused—(1) remnants of philology, (2) the practice called "literary history" in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, (3) a practice that is originally extracurricular and journalistic, namely literary criticism. Literary criticism and its precursor, belles lettres, are connected in complicated ways to a fourth disciplinary practice, composition. Composition is of course now breaking away in many places, forming a discipline of its own, like a moon separating from a planet. Discipline formation has that kind of complexity to it; it's full of conflict and struggle, the residue of which is incoherence.

Williams: With Graff's notion of conflict, sometimes it seems that everybody meets on the same chessboard. I think that there are all these different chessboards, a little skewed, strange, and asymmetrical.

Guillory: We all owe a lot to Graff, because his book was the first to emerge from this historical sea. You have to begin with the narrative that he gives us of the scholars and the critics. But I'm trying to complicate that picture by filling in a much broader canvas and a much larger and more complicated context that impinges on the formation of scholars as scholars and critics as critics, finally attempting to address the crucial moment of discipline formation in the 1940s and 50s when the extracurricular discourse of criticism is fused with the "scholarly" forms of literary studies, philology and literary history.

Williams: You're chair now at NYU and have been for three years, but it seems like you're still quite busy writing.

Guillory: Not busy enough. Being chair is very time consuming. But I've published some work related to the book, like the Sokal piece [in Critical Inquiry], which is a satellite essay.

Williams: What drew you to this line of thinking? Why are you compelled to write about the profession?

Guillory: I just got very interested in the sociology of disciplines and in professions generally. The chief sociological context for understanding the history of disciplines is the transformation of the American university in the later nineteenth century into an institution serving the professional managerial class, and emergent professional and technical fields. My hope is that if I can produce a narrative account that has the kind of intelligibility that I'd like it to have, then that account would say a lot about why we are troubled by certain perennial puzzles in literary studies—the tendency of literary critics, for example, to justify what they do not with reference to their subject matter, but with reference to very large social aims usually characterized as political.

Williams: Although I see a return to aesthetic justifications, which assert the discrepant value of literature among the disciplines, precisely because we can't compete with science and its grants.

Guillory: That's one movement, the return to the aesthetic. But my sense is that it's still the case that when people are asked why they do what they do and what they hope to accomplish in literary studies, they almost always go for the justification of the discipline in terms of ultimate political effects. Those terms produce aporia between what one actually does in the classroom—the reading of literary texts or related cultural artifacts—and political efficacy. I’ve always been frustrated by that gap and interested in it. But I think that an understanding of the discipline will relate the extracurricular form of criticism and evolution of the man of letters, whom I call in the Sokal essay "the authoritarian culture critic," into a form of literary study that is disciplinarized in the later nineteenth century. This isn't just a question of scholars and critics, but a question of the varieties of scholarship and criticism, the ways in which those social constructs—the scholar, the critic—inhabit the same body. For us it's not scholars versus critics, because we are the final product of a discipline that solidifies into its own form around the middle of the twentieth century, at the moment when scholars and critics began to inhabit the same body.

Williams: If you were asked what you do it for, I assume you wouldn't answer political effectivity. What would you answer?

Guillory: I would describe a set of goals, some of which are very local and specific to the classroom, some of which are specific to the venues of scholarship, and then work outward from there in concentric circles to the social and political contexts of literary study. The immediate classroom goals have to do with reading and writing, to a lesser extent with speaking (probably to a lesser extent than should be the case). So I'm pointing first to cognitive skills of a very particular sort, because they're practiced with cultural artifacts of a very specific kind. If you talk about works of visual art, you talk about a related but different set of cognitive skills.

Literary studies, in addition, is an historical discipline. This is what I mean by arraying sets of goals in concentric circles moving out from the inner core of the discipline, which is the study of cultural artifacts, usually written artifacts of a particular kind. So I would move to another concentric circle, which has to do with historical contextualization, with the larger understanding of how writing functions within a culture and how it functions and changes over time. From there, move to larger social formations and political structures. It's a set of steps or procedures through which you can move progressively outward.

I don't think that the right way to conceive this is to read texts as in any way immediately revelatory of that further-most circle in the set of concentric circles. That shortcircuits the process and produces a dogmatization of teaching, and of scholarship as well. I often find good scholarship in books and articles, but then a gap between the scholarship and the claim. There isn't quite enough in the reconstruction of the milieu of a cultural artifact to produce the political and social effects that are being claimed for that particular cultural artifact or for the reading of the artifact in the work of criticism.

Williams: Instead of subversion and containment, which is by now a predictable new historical move, you're saying there's more of a hesitation or almost an ambivalence between a text and its political effect. Instead of a reversal there's a gap.

Guillory: The gap is not emptiness but a set of mediations. I want to put those mediations back in, to make the context-world as rich as it can possibly be so that you can construct the links and affiliations that will take you to the larger social and political structures. But scholarship should take you there by way of the affiliations that actually constitute the historical milieu, not the ones that you import from the present milieu, as an anachronistic set of terms.

Williams: I want to bring up the question of the academic job market and your piece "Preprofessionalism," which has become a fairly well-known statement on it. On the one hand, you brought attention to the plight of graduate students, which is all to the good, especially since there seemed to be a certain head-in-the-sand attitude in MLA about it. On the flipside, I agree with Marc Bousquet's account over yours on the question of the market. You say something like, "there is only one thing that we can do, and that is to decrease graduate programs," whereas Bousquet points out that the problem is not a shortage of teaching positions but that they have been reconfigured as disposable labor. So, how does your account bear on labor as it's configured now?

Guillory: That essay is some years old and I've had a lot of thoughts since then and a lot of responses, including Marc Bousquet's response, to contemplate. It's quite obvious that simply reducing the size of entering classes, or reducing the aggregate size of the graduate student population (though I do think was and is necessary as a short term measure), is not a solution to the long-term problem. I wrote a follow-up piece in PMLA, "The System of Graduate Education," which went further than the preprofessionalism essay. It's a little bit more cautious an argument, and as a result provoked a less vehement response. People often misread the preprofessionalism essay as an attack on professionalism, which it certainly was not.

In any case, I hadn't then fully acknowledged what I recognize now to be a transformation in the professoriate as a labor force, and that is the ratio of non-tenure track and tenured faculty and all of the forces that go into that. I do believe that there is a labor market, and one has no option but to respond to the market individually. We do not have the option to give advice to our students that is unresponsive to the market aspects of hiring. But even if we all did better at preparing our students for the market, that would only level the playing field. The selection process would perhaps become fairer, although the ways in which it's unfair are the same ways that the hierarchization of the system is unfair—the advantage people have at elite institutions in relation to people on the market from non-elite institutions competing for certain kinds of jobs. That sort of thing is very entrenched and will be hard to overcome. Other forces, like the way in which a certain stratum of the system is favoring second-term assistant professors as opposed to entry level, are market forces, and everyone finds themselves doing this without making very conscious decisions or giving elaborate reasons. But the effects are quite pernicious.

The main factor to grasp and try to figure out is the transformation of the professoriate from predominantly tenured to predominately non-tenure track, and how that can be addressed. It certainly can't be addressed locally, in the sense that individual institutions can simply opt out of this system if they don't have the resources. One way of describing it is that the tenure system has been eroded over the last 25 years. The answer will probably not be the extension of tenure-track positions to all those other people who have fallen off the tenure track, or who never made it to the tenure track. It doesn't seem to me that you can get there from here, or that it is, as Cary Nelson and others would like to think, simply a political decision about how we use resources. Even if you say "Let's just level the salaries for everyone in the profession and put everyone on the tenure track"—

Williams: Like civil service jobs. I would go for that—

Guillory: So we'd all be making about $15,000 a year. That's probably what it would be, if you averaged it across the professoriate as a whole, and that figure would express—probably accurately—the social valuation of the humanist professoriate. The likelihood of such a politically mandated leveling of compensation, however desirable the goal of social equity, is pretty slender. It also does not take into account service and merit and all the things that go into salary differentials. So I would call that an imaginary solution which posits a world in which economics is subordinated to politics. But if you think about the tenure system as part of the problem, then you might be able to imagine a solution in which we recognize that part of the problem is that we've divided up the professoriate according to the distinction between tenured and non-tenured (rather than tenure-track and adjunct). Perhaps it is tenure itself that needs to be put on the table. We need to think about ways of producing a more diverse professoriate in terms of its labor, so that the professoriate doesn't separate into two groups and two poles of advantage and disadvantage.

I'm not describing a solution, but describing a different way of conceiving the problem. A solution might entail not so much simply leveling salaries across the board and awarding tenure to everyone, but rethinking tenure, since it is the tenure system that produces the fork in the road, that allocates and distributes a smaller number (45%-48%) to the tenure track and the larger number to the non-tenure track.

Williams: How would you describe your own position? You mentioned at lunch that you come from a working class background in New Orleans, where your father was a TV repairman. I can't help but feel that that might have something to do with why you reflect on the profession. For me, I feel like I have one foot in and one foot out; the profession has always felt a little strange to me. For someone who knows Bourdieu, these things must cross your mind.

Guillory: Sure they have. This is the point at which I would refer to Bourdieu's description of the scholarship boy (or girl) as the "oblate," and defer to it so I don't have to produce it in autobiographical form, and this is probably all that I will ever put in print on the subject. (At least I don't have any plans for an autobiography!) But yes, I do think it's probably why I’m so interested in the profession, because it's a profession that I entered partly by chance and by luck. I think I was bright enough to enter, but that doesn’t guarantee you entry if you really are as immersed, as I was in the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up and a teenager, in a working-class Catholic culture. That made becoming an academic at an institution like Yale or Harvard simply inconceivable and bizarre.

I did have one alternative exit from a culture that valued intellectuality very little, and that was to become a priest. I could have done that put to the point at which I stopped believing, thanks to the Jesuits who gave me the instruments to dismantle the faith.

Williams: Then you really would have been an oblate.

Guillory: Yes, I really would have been. But becoming a teacher of English literature was the most obvious alternative to becoming a priest.

Williams: You'd probably agree that we don't have master theorists in quite the way we used to, but you're obviously in a significant position professionally, having garnered the Harvard theory job, among other things. You've successfully negotiated the channels of legitimating bodies, in Bourdieu's phrase, and you have in fact become a legitimating body.

Guillory: I'd certainly admit that I'd like to have an impact; anyone who enters the profession wants to. It's a profession that's semi-anarchistic in that people jockey for position; it's not like the cliché image of a civil service in which you get rewarded just for punching the time card. You can push yourself however far you want to go and stake out positions and argue hard for them. That's how you get ahead in this profession. I've done a considerable amount of that, for the sake of having an impact. I try to be as conscientious and self-reflexive about this aspect of the profession as I can, in the sense that I don't think it's an end in itself.

I'm saying something like what Bourdieu implies about his relation to sociology, that I’d like to pay off a debt. I have a debt to discharge, vis-à-vis an alternative life in which I would have done something more expected for someone with my class background. But my interests in the sociology of the profession and literary studies are sustaining enough just by virtue of the density and complexity of the problems that emerge in this field of study. The richness of the history is enough to sustain me, regardless of whatever other motives I might have in taking the subject up.

John Guillory is chair of the English Department at NYU.