Sociology of Literature - Bourdieu

Bourdieu

Bourdieu was Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France and Director of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne. His first major contribution to the sociology of literature (and other arts) was La Distinction, published in French in 1979 and in English translation in 1984. It is based on detailed sociological surveys and ethnographic observation of the social distribution of cultural preferences. Bourdieu identified three main zones of taste, 'legitimate', 'middle-brow' and 'popular', which he found to be dominant respectively in the educated sections of the dominant class, the middle classes and the working classes. He described legitimate taste as centred on an 'aesthetic disposition' to assert the primacy of form over function. The 'popular aesthetic', by contrast, is based on continuity between art and life and 'a deep-rooted demand for participation'. Hence, its hostility to representations of objects that in real life are either ugly or immoral. Artistic and social 'distinction' are inextricably interrelated, he concluded, because the 'pure gaze' implies a break with ordinary attitudes towards the world and, as such, is a 'social break'.

The Rules of Art is more specifically focussed on literature, especially the significance of Gustave Flaubert for the making of modern French literature. Bourdieu postulated a model of 'the field of cultural production' as structured externally in relation to the 'field of power' and internally in relation to two 'principles of hierarchization', the heteronomous and the autonomous. The modern literary and artistic field is a site of contestation between the heteronomous principle, subordinating art to economy, and the autonomous, resisting such subordination. In Bourdieu's map of the French literary field in the late nineteenth century, the most autonomous genre, that is, the least economically profitable - poetry - is to the left, whilst the most heteronomous, the most economically profitable - drama - is to the right, with the novel located somewhere in between. Additionally, higher social status audiences govern the upper end of the field and lower status audiences the lower end. Flaubert's distinctive achievement in L'Éducation sentimentale was, in Bourdieu's account, to have understood and defined the rules of modern autonomous art.