John Guillory considers close reading within the larger history of reading and writing as cultural techniques.At a time of debate about the future of "English" as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study, few terms appear more frequently than "close reading," now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study. But what exactly is close reading, and where did it come from? Here John Guillory, author of the acclaimed Professing Criticism...

A sociological history of literary study—both as a discipline and as a profession.As the humanities in higher education struggle with a labor crisis and with declining enrollments, the travails of literary study are especially profound. No scholar has analyzed the discipline's contradictions as authoritatively as John Guillory. In this much-anticipated new book, Guillory shows how the study of literature has been organized, both historically and in the modern era, ...

An enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory's formative text on the literary canon.Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory's Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge on which culture has long been based. Dr...

"[A] landmark work . . . which showed how literary evaluation draws authority from the institutions—principally universities—within which it is practiced." — The New YorkerWinner of the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature AssociationJohn Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical framework. The result is a book...

For several years, write the editors of What's Left of Theory , a debate on the politics of theory has been conducted energetically within literary studies. The terms of the debate, however, are far from clear. What is meant by politics? What is meant by theory? What's Left of Theory is a vigorous engagement with that thorniest of critical questions: how today are theory and progressive thought connected? Michael Warner, activist and critic, examines 'zones of privacy and zones of theory' ...

The work of Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most influential French intellectuals of the twentieth century, has had an enormous impact on research in fields as diverse as aesthetics, education, anthropology, and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Art, Literature, and Culture is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on the contribution of Bourdieu's thought to the study of cultural production. Though Bourdieu's own work has illuminated diverse cultural phenomena, t...

This issue of Profession contains Russell A. Berman’s introduction to his Presidential Forum, Language, Literature, Learning, held at the 2012 MLA convention, and the essays of the forum participants Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Christopher Freeburg, Jack Halberstam, B. Venkat Mani, and Imani Perry. To mark the journal’s thirty-fifth anniversary, the issue also features a retrospective sampling of articles that illustrate the evolution of the profession and of the professional issues...

Book One in the Mages of Martir seriesThirty-five-year-old Darek Takren always did his best to keep up with the demands of the prestigious North Academy, a magical school where only those with the drive to succeed are allowed to learn. Having lived in the school for his whole life, Darek Takren sees North Academy as his home, a sanctuary safe from the troubles that plague the outside world.But when his best friend is injured in an unexpected attack on the s...

Ever since a drunken one-night stand gone wrong, single mother Meredith Banks can't seem to shake Christian Morgan, the hypnotically attractive and dangerously obsessive intern from her office. It started with the late night phone calls, the hang-ups, the unwanted visits to her row home in Detroit. Now her son Troy, all that matters in her world, has gone missing after school.Meredith knows Christian is behind her son's disappearance, but the cops won't help without evidence. To fi...

By a USA Today Bestselling Author. After decades of clandestine government operations, James "Beck" Becker and his wife Elizabeth return to Beck's childhood home town to enjoy a settled retirement in the small Mississippi river community of Red Wing, Minnesota. But "settled" is a relative term and no matter where Beck goes, intrigue follows. When Minneapolis computer genius, Katherine Whitson, disappears under peculiar circumstances...

A single mom and her teenage daughter move next to a spooky old house, and the small-town sheriff comes to their aid.THE GHOST NEXT DOORWhen destiny takes a hand...You've got to hold on tight.When single mom Elizabeth Jennings gets sent to a new town to revamp its weekly paper, she resists. Her daughter Claire is just fifteen, and has recently started high school. But Elizabeth’s boss insists, so the two pack up and move to...

Death Comes To Us AllIt is sixty years since a great war made the Earth uninhabitable. The few survivors took shelter within towered cities. They, and now their descendants, have only one goal: to construct colony ships so that they can leave the ruined planet in the hope of establishing a settlement on Mars.The first of those ships is nearing completion. If the species is to survive, then nothing can interfere with this last great effort. But the city is n...