Bourdieu and Literature E-Book

John R.W. Speller

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Bourdieu and Literature is a wide-ranging, rigorous and accessible introduction to the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu's work and literary studies. It provides a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of his contributions to literary theory and his thinking about authors and literary works.One of the foremost French intellectuals of the post-war era, Bourdieu has become a standard point of reference in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, art history, cultural studies, politics, and sociology, but his longstanding interest in literature has often been overlooked. This study explores the impact of literature on Bourdieu's intellectual itinerary, and how his literary understanding intersected with his sociological theory and thinking about cultural policy.This is the first full-length study of Bourdieu's work on literature in English, and it provides an invaluable resource for students and scholars of literary studies, cultural theory and sociology.

Leseprobe

BOURDIEU AND LITERATURE

John R.W. Speller is Head of Foreign Languages and teaches the sociology of organisations at the International Faculty of Engineering, Łódź University of Technology in Poland. He is also co-editor (with Jeremy Ahearne) of Pierre Bourdieu and the Literary Field (2012).

Bourdieu and Literature

John R.W. Speller

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© 2011 John R.W. SpellerVersion 1.1. Creative Commons licence changed and minor edits made, July 2013.

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John R.W. Speller, Bourdieu and Literature (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2011), and the appropriate DOI.

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Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Positions

The field of reception

The field of production

Lévi-Strauss and structuralism

The death of intellectuals

Post-structuralism

Appendix: the composition of Les Règles de l’art

2. Methods

Epistemological preliminaries

The author’s point of view

The field of power

The literary field

Habitus and trajectory

The space of possibilities

World literary space

Appendix: reflexivity and reading

3. Autonomy

The evolution of the literary field

Art and money

Zola and the Dreyfus affair

Reversals

Autonomy and value

4. Science and Literature

L’Éducation sentimentale

‘Le démontage impie de la fiction’

Cross-overs

Fiction and realism

5. Literature and Cultural Politics

The production of the dominant ideology

‘La Pensée Tietmeyer’

On aesthetics and ideology

A politics of form

For a collective intellectual

6. Literature and Cultural Policy

Reproduction and distinction

Proposals for the future of education

Between the state and the free market

For a corporatism of the universal

Conclusion

References

A. Works by Pierre Bourdieu

B. Secondary sources

C. Collectively or anonymously authored works

Index

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Open Book Publishers for their help with editing and revising this book. I am grateful to Jeremy Ahearne, who has been my mentor on Bourdieu from the beginning. I am also grateful to Jeremy Lane for reading and commenting on draft versions. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my wife, Magda, who has borne its writing with patience and good humour.

Abbreviations

AAL’Amour de l’art: les musées d’art européens et leur public (The Love of Art, European Art Museums and their Public)CDChoses dites (In Other Words)CF1Contre-feux 1 (Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market)CF2Contre-feux 2 (Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2)CPPropos sur le champ politiqueDLa Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste)DMLa Domination masculine (Masculine Domination)EEsquisse pour une auto-analyse (Sketch for a Self-Analysis)ETPEsquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (Outline of a Theory of Practice)FCPThe Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and LiteratureHLes Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture)HAHomo academicus (Homo Academicus)IInterventions 1961-2001: science sociale et action politique (Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action)IDLa Production de l’idéologie dominanteIRSAn Invitation to Reflexive SociologyLELibre-échange (Free Exchange)LLLeçon sur la leçonLPSLangage et pouvoir symbolique (Language and Symbolic Power)MMLa Misère du monde (The Weight of the World)MPMéditations pascaliennes (Pascalian Meditations)MSLe Métier de sociologue: préalables épistémologiques (The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries)NELa Noblesse d’État: grandes écoles et esprit de corps (The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power)QSQuestions de sociologie (Sociology in Question)RLa Reproduction: éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement (Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture)RALes Règles de l’art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire (The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field)RPRaisons pratiques: sur la théorie de l’action (Practical reason: On the Theory of Action)SPLe Sens pratique (The Logic of Practice)SSRScience de la science et réflexivité (Science of Science and Reflexivity)TSur la télévision: suivi de l’emprise du journalisme (On Television)

References to the French editions of Bourdieu’s published works will be given in the text, using the abbreviations listed above. Translations are supplied in the footnotes, using shortened forms of the English titles. In view of the range of literature referred to in the text, it has not proved possible in every case to trace English translations of works originating in other languages. The author’s own translations are given on such occasions, indicated by the initials J.S. Full details of translated works are given in the bibliography at the end of the book.

Introduction

At the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu was a contender for the position of France’s foremost intellectual, and one of the most influential sociologists in the world. A Chair in sociology at the Collège de France from 1981, he wrote on a wide range of topics from Kabyle society to French cultural taste, and from housing policy to fine art. Translated into some forty languages, his works have become standard points of reference in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, art history, cultural studies, politics, sociology, and beyond. Yet Bourdieu’s work on literature has so far received relatively little attention, especially in the Anglophone world. If few literature students in French universities have read even a single page of Bourdieu, this is even more likely to be true of their counterparts across the Channel and the Atlantic.1

Certainly, Bourdieu’s sociology of culture can appear bleak and pessimistic – to the extent that some critics have even interpreted it as an ‘attack’ on cultural creators, intellectuals, and critics, and on the very institutions of art and literature. To these critics, Bourdieu’s sociology would seem to reduce all high art and literature merely to so much ‘cultural capital’, denying it any role other than that of reproducing and naturalising class distinction. Individual literary works would appear merely as the euphemised expressions of struggles for power and prestige within a narrowly defined literary field. Writers, and the battery of critics, scholars, and publishers supporting them, would ignore or deny the commercial and symbolic interests which drive them, so involved are they in the literary game, and so accepting are they of its unspoken rules and premises (what Bourdieu calls the field’s illusio). Not only is this sociology ‘reductionist’, the critics argue, but the sociologist, who steps in as a selfstyled ‘de-mystifier’, commits the double (and sometimes simultaneous) faux pas of stating the obvious and the taboo.

This study sets out to go beyond these superficial arguments, which have been debated often enough (not least by Bourdieu). First, it examines Bourdieu’s methodology for analysing literary works, and demonstrates that it offers genuine insights for those involved in literary study. Second, it will show that although Bourdieu was keenly aware of the role that consecrated literature could play in reproducing class distinctions, his sociology also accorded literature a privileged status in struggles for political and aesthetic autonomy. This study seeks therefore to examine precisely how Bourdieu understood the relationship between literature and politics, and how he reconciled his emphasis on literature’s distinctive function with a continued belief in its emancipatory potential. Thirdly and finally, this study will show how Bourdieu’s belief in literature as a force for emancipation was reflected in the series of concrete proposals he made for the reform of literary education, at both school and university level.

The opening chapter provides a first notion of the spaces of positions and position-takings in which Bourdieu’s theories of the literary field were developed, expressed, and received. This chapter positions Bourdieu in relation to the major figures in the French intellectual field in the 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and to the later schools of structuralism and post-structuralism, including post-modernism and deconstruction. The chapter introduces the problématique regarding Bourdieu’s work on literature from the point of view of the Anglophone field of reception, explaining its relatively belated reception in Britain and America. This exposition then serves as a starting point for the chapters that follow.

Chapter 2 provides a generative blueprint for conducting a ‘Bourdieusian’ analysis of a literary work, author, and field. It compares Bourdieu’s approach with more established literary theories, including Russian Formalism, literary structuralism, and literary Marxism. It assesses Bourdieu’s claim to have forged a link between internal reading and external analysis (of biographical, social, economic, and other determinations). It addresses previous and possible criticisms of Bourdieu’s method, and discusses recent attempts to apply Bourdieu’s framework to other national traditions and to extend it to the transnational level of ‘world literary space’.

The third chapter traces Bourdieu’s historical account of the genesis of the French literary field and its development over time, using the concepts presented in Chapter 2. This chapter shows how literature developed with other fields (the scientific field, the economic field, the political field), as part of a single process of evolution, autonomisation and differentiation. Focusing on the critical period of the nineteenth century, it charts the creation of a restricted and relatively autonomous field of production by writers including Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert. It also discusses Bourdieu’s account of the invention of the figure of the engaged intellectual by Émile Zola, which brought the French literary field to a level of autonomy from economic and political power it has not exceeded since. The chapter concludes by outlining Bourdieu’s claim that the literary and cultural fields have now entered a phase of ‘involution’ in the face of commercial and political pressures, bringing with them new forms of censorship and patronage.

Chapter 4 examines Bourdieu’s claim to have produced a ‘science of works’, and the opposition he sets up between a ‘scientific’ sociology and ‘literature’. It places Bourdieu’s theory of sociological knowledge in the context of Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of science, from which he develops his epistemology. It then reads Bourdieu’s analysis of Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale as an exploration of the difference between a ‘scientific’ and a ‘literary’ representation of social reality. The chapter shows how Bourdieu drew inspiration from literary writers in his own sociological writing; and how literary writers, most notably Annie Ernaux, have in turn been influenced by Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s position with regard to the relations between literature, science, and reality is finally contrasted with those of contemporary post-structuralist and postmodernist theories of ‘textuality’.

Chapter 5 explains Bourdieu’s interest in literature in terms of its ability to convey critical messages to very wide audiences. It begins by showing how Bourdieu himself made use of literary devices and techniques in his political writings, starting with his 1976 article on ‘La Production de l’idéologie dominante’. It then looks at examples of engaged art and literature that served as models for Bourdieu, including works by Günter Grass and Karl Krauss. The chapter, finally, follows Bourdieu’s efforts to establish intellectual groupings that could combine the skills and resources of writers, artists, and researchers, including with plans for the International Parliament of Writers and Liber, a European book review, and explores the reasons for which these projects ultimately failed.

The last chapter explores the cultural policy implications of Bourdieu’s work on literature. Focusing on two reports commissioned by the French government in the 1980s, it shows how Bourdieu envisioned a literature that would fit into a more integrated education system, and would equip students to live in a multi-cultural world and a modern democracy. It also follows his arguments in favour of state protection and subsidies for literature and the arts, and consequently against the ‘neo-liberal’ policy agenda of the 1990s, including the 2000 GATS negotiations. Finally, the chapter shows how Bourdieu urged cultural producers and agencies of diffusion (publishers, libraries, teachers, researchers) to work together to defend and disseminate intellectual and therefore literary culture, by forming what he calls a ‘corporation of the universal’.

In short, against the limited reading of Bourdieu’s work on literature as a form of sociological reductionism, the key arguments this study presents are (1) that Bourdieu’s sociology offers a new and penetrating method of reading literature, (2) that such readings retain a keen sense of the specificity of literature and its political potential, (3) that Bourdieu saw literature as a useful store of ideational and expressive resources, which could also be of use to sociologists, and (4) moreover, all this feeds into the various proposals Bourdieu made regarding literary education over the course of his career. Far from an ‘attack’ on literary culture, then, Bourdieu’s sociology of literature represents a theoretically sophisticated and wide ranging exposé of the literary game, which, while at times disenchanting, offers a fresh perspective on some of the most enduring problems in literary criticism, and on some of the most urgent issues facing literature today.

Footnotes

1 See Jean-Pierre Martin, ‘Avant-Propos. Bourdieu le Désenchanteur’, in Jean-Pierre Martin, ed. Bourdieu et la Littérature (Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2010), 7-21 (p. 7).

1. Positions

Are Bourdieu’s analyses of literature any more than a diversion from his more ‘serious’ sociological research? Unlike his other major studies of social fields, which were written in collaboration with teams of researchers and co-authors, Bourdieu’s work on literature seems to have been a largely solitary affair, suggesting that it was something of a sideline to which he returned when he needed a rest from his ‘hard’ scientific labours. Again, while literature provides an important source of anecdote, illustration, and insight across much of the rest of Bourdieu’s work, it appears most often in the form of epigraphs, footnotes, and annexes, contributing to the impression that literature was somehow marginal, or even ornamental, in his work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the vast metadiscourse of Anglophone introductions and general studies on Bourdieu, his work on literature has itself been sidelined, rarely receiving even an entire chapter’s attention.1 And while we have had books on Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (1997), Bourdieu and Education: Acts of Practical Theory (1998), Bourdieu and Culture (1999), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (2004), Art Rules: Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts (2006), Bourdieu’s Politics: Problems and Possibilities (2006), Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education (2008), and most recently Bourdieu in Algeria (2009), there had yet to be written a single-authored work on Bourdieu and Literature.2

Other facts, however, suggest that literature occupied a far more important position in Bourdieu’s own mind and work than has so far been widely acknowledged. Literature was an early and recurrent theme in Bourdieu’s publications. He first brought literary themes into his argument in ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’ (1966),3 and elaborated his vision of the literary field in ‘Le Marché des biens symboliques’ (1971).4 Subsequently, a substantial fraction of his work centred on cultural production, and included a specific focus on literature. Many of these writings were collected, revised, and re-published in 1992 as Literature also played an important role in the development of Bourdieu’s theory. His key concept of was first developed through his studies of literature, which determined its initial properties, and oriented its future applications. Finally, Bourdieu frequently expressed a strong sense of personal identification with his literary and artistic heroes, an identification he reiterates on the final page of his final book, (2004).