To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/80 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. 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 2011 http://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2011 John R.W. Speller Version 1.1. Creative Commons licence changed and minor edits made, July 2013. This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC-BY 3.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any ayw that suggests that he endorse you or your use of the work). Further details available at http://www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781906924423 Attribution should include the following information: John R.W. Speller, Bourdieu and Literature (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2011), and the appropriate DOI. As with all Open Book Publishers titles, digital material and resources associated with this volume are available from our website: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781906924423 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-906924-43-0 ISBN Paperback: 978-1-906924-42-3 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-906924-44-7 ISBN Digital ebook (epub version): 978-1-78374-005-5 ISBN Digital ebook(mobi version): 978-1-78374-006-2 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0027 Cover image © Craig Richardson (all rights reserved). All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers Contents Abbreviations 11 Introduction 13 1. Positions 17 The field of reception 19 The field of production 23 Lévi-Strauss and structuralism 26 The death of intellectuals 29 Post-structuralism 31 Appendix: the composition of Les Règles de l’art 34 2. Methods 39 Epistemological preliminaries 40 The author’s point of view 45 The field of power 46 The literary field 50 Habitus and trajectory 59 The space of possibilities 64 World literary space 71 Appendix: reflexivity and reading 75 3. Autonomy 79 The evolution of the literary field 80 Art and money 85 Zola and the Dreyfus affair 89 Reversals 92 Autonomy and value 96 4. Science and Literature 103 L’Éducation sentimentale 103 ‘Le démontage impie de la fiction’ 109 Cross-overs 115 Fiction and realism 123 8 Bourdieu and Literature 5. Literature and Cultural Politics 131 The production of the dominant ideology 131 ‘La Pensée Tietmeyer’ 135 On aesthetics and ideology 138 A politics of form 143 For a collective intellectual 146 6. Literature and Cultural Policy 153 Reproduction and distinction 153 Proposals for the future of education 163 Between the state and the free market 175 For a corporatism of the universal 181 Conclusion 185 References 191 A. Works by Pierre Bourdieu 191 B. Secondary sources 194 C. Collectively or anonymously authored works 200 Index 201 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 AA L’Amour de l’art: les musées d’art européens et leur public (The Love of Art, European Art Museums and their Public) CD Choses dites (In Other Words) CF1 Contre-feux 1 (Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market) CF2 Contre-feux 2 (Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2) CP Propos sur le champ politique D La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste) DM La Domination masculine (Masculine Domination) E Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (Sketch for a Self-Analysis) ETP Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (Outline of a Theory of Practice) FCP The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature H Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture) HA Homo academicus (Homo Academicus) I Interventions 1961-2001: science sociale et action politique (Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action) ID La Production de l’idéologie dominante IRS An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology LE Libre-échange (Free Exchange) LL Leçon sur la leçon LPS Langage et pouvoir symbolique (Language and Symbolic Power) MM La Misère du monde (The Weight of the World) MP Méditations pascaliennes (Pascalian Meditations) MS Le Métier de sociologue: préalables épistémologiques (The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries) NE La Noblesse d’État: grandes écoles et esprit de corps (The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power) 12 Bourdieu and Literature QS Questions de sociologie (Sociology in Question) R La Reproduction: éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement (Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture) RA Les Règles de l’art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire (The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field) RP Raisons pratiques: sur la théorie de l’action (Practical reason: On the Theory of Action) SP Le Sens pratique (The Logic of Practice) SSR Science de la science et réflexivité (Science of Science and Reflexivity) T Sur 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 self- styled ‘de-mystifier’, commits the double (and sometimes simultaneous) faux pas of stating the obvious and the taboo. 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). DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0027.01 14 Bourdieu and Literature 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.