Bourdieu’s Work on Literature

Theory, Culture and Society 23 (6):135-155 (2006)
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Abstract

What explanation can be given for the relevance of literature to Bourdieu's theoretical work? In order to explain this choice of object, in the first part of this article I consider the national and international context within which Bourdieu's theory has been built. In the French intellectual space literature was a central theoretical object. In the international context, the attention paid to literature was justified by the importance given to the symbolic phenomena in the main contemporary theoretical traditions. In order to appreciate the singularity and difficulty of Bourdieu's theoretical acquisition, I try to reconstruct the problems that he attempted to resolve, the theoretical possibilities with regard to which his hypotheses were defined, and the position that he held in his field of production at the time in which they were formulated. In Bourdieu's thought, this conjunctural dimension does not imply that a theory is particularized or relativized. So he presented his theoretical frameworks on literature as a model applying to any kind of cultural products. In the second part of my paper I intend to test these claims by examining under what conditions and to what extent his `Principles of a science of works' have been considerd transposable to other national contexts and/or to new objects.

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References found in this work

The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature.Pierre Bourdieu & Randal Johnson - 1996 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1):88-90.
Rethinking classical theory.Rogers Brubaker - 1985 - Theory and Society 14 (6):745-775.
The Corporatism of the Universal: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World.P. Bourdieu - 1989 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 1989 (81):99-110.

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