To be fully understood, literary production has to be approached in relational terms, by constructing the literary field, i.e. the space of literary prises de position that are possible in a given period in a given society. Prises de position arise from the encounter between particular agents' dispositions (their habitus, shaped by their social trajectory) and their position in a field of positions which is defined by the distribution of a specific form of capital. This specific literary (or artistic, or philosophical, etc.) capital functions within an ‘economy’ whose logic is an inversion of the logic of the larger economy of the society. The ‘interest in distinterestedness’ can be understood by examining the structural relations between the field of literary production and the field of class relations. A number of effects within the literary field arise from the homologies between positions within the two fields. This model is then used to analyze the particular case of the literary field in late 19th century France.

The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed - Pierre Bourdieu PDF

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