British Academy Spring 2025 Lecture

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”: The Problem of Social Capital

This lecture will address a problem in Pierre Bourdieu's conception of "three forms of capital": material, cultural, and social. As scholars have noted, Bourdieu extensively discusses cultural capital, and has comparatively little to say about social capital. Through proposing a theory of social capital as a form of "knowing”, this talk will apply 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 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.

John Guillory is Professor of English, Emeritus, New York University. He has taught at Yale University, Harvard University, and Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of On Close Reading (2025), Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (2023), Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022), Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (1983), and many essays on Renaissance literature, as well essays on the early history of media studies.

Philip McGowan is a Professor of English in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. His current research investigates the interrelation between twentieth-century poetry and philosophy, in particular in the works of Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop. The overlaps between philosophy and American writing also extend into his work on F. Scott Fitzgerald, in particular his short stories in the 1930s. The outworkings of his research include examinations of American routines of addiction, the writing of silence, and of suicide in contemporary literature.

Event in partnership with the British Academy and Queen’s University Belfast

Image: Arrow Collar Ad (1914) Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874 - 1951)

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