John Frow


John Frow is an Australian academic who works in the areas of literary theory, narrative theory, intellectual property law, and cultural studies. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Sydney.

Career

Frow’s research is situated at the boundary between the humanities and the social sciences, and ranges from quite technical work in literary theory and discourse analysis through to empirical and statistically-based sociology.
His doctoral work and his first book, "Marxism and Literary History", sought to rework Marxist theory for a non-determinist account of literary systems. Drawing on Althusser and Foucault, as well as on Russian Formalist theory, German reception aesthetics, a critical engagement with post-structuralist theory, and on a broad range of literary texts, it theorized the relation between discourse and power, the relational structure of literary texts and systems, and the dynamics of literary change.
All of Frow’s later work draws on the framework elaborated in this book, although he has subsequently moved away from a commitment to Marxism towards a more Foucauldian understanding of social and discursive power. "Cultural Studies and Cultural Value" undertook a critique of the hierarchy of value that sorts ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture into distinct domains, arguing that the field of culture now has multiple centres and multiple domains of value which are irreducible to a single scale.
The book formulated an account of the ‘knowledge class’ of information workers and argued that it has specific interests in the field of culture. The central essay of "Time and Commodity Culture" theorized the distinction and the inter-dependence of gift and commodity economies as a way of analysing the encroachment of the commodity form on the commons in information; other essays in the book explored the temporality of capital as the basis for historical understanding and the technologies of memory.
"Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures", written with Tony Bennett and Michael Emmison, is a study, based on a broad survey and the resulting quantitative analysis, of the cultural practices and preferences of Australians across a range of cultural areas. It sought to develop an account of social class in which cultural capital plays a central and formative role, and developed the concept of the regime of value to theorize the structural regularities it found.

Books

Frow’s most recent books have focused on questions of literary theory and its relation to cultural studies. "Genre" explores the work of generic classification across a range of literary and cultural texts, understanding genres not as fixed frameworks but as dynamic processes of organization of social knowledge.
"The Practice of Value" is a collection of essays on the relationship between literary and cultural studies. And "Character and Person" explores the nature of human personhood by setting models of the person in relation to models of fictional character in a number of distinct literary and cinematic systems. The book argues both for the specificity of the person and fictional character, and for the ways in which each of them depends upon and informs our understanding of the other. Its concepts are "formal enough to bring us back to history," and develop "an unprecedentedly systematic model for understanding both literary character and social person, which are always defined in relation to one another."

Education

Frow was educated at Wagga High School and the Australian National University. After working and travelling for two years in Buenos Aires and elsewhere in South America he undertook graduate studies in the Comparative Literature Department at Cornell University. He received his PhD in 1977.

Academic positions

After holding teaching positions at Knox College, Sydney, in 1969, the Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires in 1970, and Cornell University in 1974-5, Frow’s first full-time academic position was at the newly created Murdoch University in Western Australia, where he worked from 1975 to 1988.
He taught in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Minnesota in 1988, and in 1989 took up a chair in the English Department at the University of Queensland. He moved to the University of Edinburgh as the Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in 2000, where he was also the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities; in 2004 he returned to Australia, taking up the chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Melbourne. He moved to his current position at the University of Sydney in 2013.
Frow has held visiting fellowships at Wesleyan University, the University of Chicago, New York University, and Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Editorial positions

Frow was a founding member of the "Australian Journal of Cultural Studies" and of "Cultural Studies". He was co-editor of the "Cultural Studies Review" from 2006 to 2012. He is a member of the Editorial Boards or Advisory Boards of "Textual Practice", "The Journal of Literary Criticism", "Australian Humanities Review", "Continuum", "ACH: The Journal of the History of Culture in Australia", the "Journal of Cultural Economy", "Law, Culture and the Humanities", the "Indian Journal of Law and Technology", "New Literary History", "Third Text", the "Genre Across Borders Web Resource", "Axon: Creative Explorations", "Humanities", "International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies", "Journal of Poetics Research", and "Persona Studies".
He has been a consulting editor for "Social Semiotics", a member of the board of "m/c: A Journal of Media and Culture", and was the Australian Reviews Editor for "Cultural Studies" from 1987-1996. He is the Senior Editor for Literary Theory on the "Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature".

Publications

Frow is the author of seven major monographs and two co-edited collections, in addition to a number of smaller monographs and over a hundred book chapters and refereed journal articles. His work has been widely reprinted and has been translated into Chinese, Persian, Japanese, French, Polish, Macedonian, Spanish, and Portuguese. A full cv and bibliography is available at.

Monographs