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BOURDIEU'S WORK ON LITERATURE. CONTEXTS, STAKES AND PERSPECTIVES
No full textLITERATURE HOLDS a very important place in Pierre Bourdieu’swork: his notion of field was first applied to literature, while the mostcomplete and systematic presentation of his theory of fields is to be found in The Rules of Art, a work devoted to art and literature. What expla-nation can be given for the relevance of these objects to Bourdieu’s theor-etical work? His interest in art and literature may appear somewhat surprising and improbable at first sight when one considers that for Bourdieu the sociology of culture, in the strictest sense of the term, was just one aspect of a much vaster project: a general theory of the ‘social world’. In order to explain Bourdieu’s choice of object, in the first part of this article I will consider the national and international context within which his theory has been built. I will show that in the French intellectual space, particularly in that period, 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. Bourdieu himself stated, referring to Gaston Bachelard, that ‘epistem-ology is always conjunctural: its propositions and thrust are determined by the principal scientific threat of the moment ’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 174). Moreover, against the errors that can result from an ahistorical and derealizing reading, he argued that the proper understanding of any given author requires a double contextualization. On the one hand, in order to appreciate the singularity and difficulty of his theoretical acquisition, it is necessary to bring to light the effort involved in reaching such an achieve-ment by reconstructing the mental space of the author, the problems that he attempted to resolve, the theoretical possibilities with regard to which his hypotheses were defined, and the position that the author held in his field of production at the time in which they were formulated. On the other hand
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