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John David Guillory (born 1952) is an American literary critic whose "distinguished career has transformed the ways in which the discipline of literary studies understands itself." He is the Julius Silver Professor of English Emeritus at New York University.
Guillory's book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993) argued that "the category of 'literature' names the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie, a form of capital increasingly marginal to the social function of the present educational system". Cited in After an opening chapter on the debate over the literary canon, Cultural Capital took up several 'case studies': Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the close reading of New Criticism, and literary theory after Paul De Man. Guillory viewed the rigour of 'Literary theory' as an attempt by literary scholars to reclaim its cultural capital from a newly ascendant technical professional class. Its unconscious aim was "to model the intellectual work of the theorist on the new social form of intellectual work, the technobureaucratic labour of the new professional-managerial class," Cited in "as Barbara and John Ehrenreich termed it." While the title phrase "cultural capital" invokes the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Guillory has said that "The book that I’m always trying to point people toward is Alvin Gouldner’s work . That’s where I originally started to think about the issue of the professional managerial class and the possibility of thinking about literary study in the context of the sociology of professions." A final chapter gave a history of the concept of value from Adam Smith to Barbara Herrnstein Smith.
Guillory's (2022) was an "attempt to disabuse literary scholars, literary professionals, from the idealizations that we cling to so strongly and don’t want to give up." Critic Stefan Collini called the volume "the most penetrating, and in some ways most original, study we have of the forces that have shaped the history of literary study, especially in the US."
In December 2024, Guillory delivered the keynote address at The Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) on "," described as "an attempt to clarify a longstanding controversy in the history of humanities scholarship in the university, namely its relation to political activism, and to the political in general."
In May 2025, Guillory gave the British Academy Lecture at Queen's University Belfast, titled: "'It’s not what you know, it’s who you know': The Problem of Social Capital," applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theory to an analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby (1925), with the aim of establishing the relation between cultural capital and social capital as two forms of 'knowing.' This relation correlates Jay Gatsby's desire for social capital, which he uses to pursue Daisy Buchanan, as part of Fitzgerald's bid for the text’s canonical status as a 'great' American novel."
Guillory is currently writing a book entitled Freedom of Thought: Philosophy and Literature in the English Renaissance.
1994: René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association for Cultural Capital, "an uncompromising study of the problem of canon formation itself and what that problem tells us about the crisis in contemporary education."
1997: Class of 1932 Fellow of the Humanities Council, Princeton University
2001: Tanner Lectures on Human Values at UC Berkeley, respondent to Sir Frank Kermode
2016: Francis Andrew March Award from the Association of Departments of English for "Distinguished Service to the Profession of English Studies."
2016: Golden Dozen Award for teaching, New York University
2024: Wilbur Cross Medal "for exceptional scholarship, teaching, and public service," Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS)
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