NYU Prof. to Discuss the Difference Between Professional and Lay Reading

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 10, 2003–John Guillory, professor of English at New York University, will present a talk, “Reading for a Living: Some Observations on the Difference between Professional and Lay Reading,” on Monday, March 17 at 4 p.m. in Griffin Hall, room 3.

He is the author of “Culture Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation” (1993). In it, Guillory, who believes that canon formation must be interpreted in terms of “culture capital” rather than in response to ethnicity, discusses literary curriculum in light of what he calls the “crisis of the humanities.”

Guillory’s research focuses on renaissance poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, literature and science in Renaissance, the history of criticism, the sociology of literary study, and twentieth-century literary theory.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Class of 1932 Fellow of the Council of the Humanities from Princeton University and the Rene Wellek Award of the American Comparative Literature Association. Guillory has been a member of the Folger Shakespeare’s Library’s Executive Committee and the Modern Language Association’s committee on the bibliography of the teaching of literature.

Guillory received his B.A. from Tulane in 1974 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1979.

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Published March 10, 2003