Publication date:

19 January 2000

Length of book:

256 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780847693887

The work of Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most influential French intellectuals of the twentieth century, has had an enormous impact on research in fields as diverse as aesthetics, education, anthropology, and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Art, Literature, and Culture is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on the contribution of Bourdieu's thought to the study of cultural production. Though Bourdieu's own work has illuminated diverse cultural phenomena, the essays in this volume extend to new cultural forms and to national situations outside France. Far from simply applying Bourdieu's concepts and theoretical tools to these new contexts, the essays in this volume consider both the possibility and limits of Bourdieu's sociology for the study of culture.
This sparkling and unusually coherent collection of essays emphasizes the American reception and adaptation of Bourdieu's work. It shows how Bourdieu has been resisted and embraced and discusses how his terms and methods might be both used and modified by American academics. Theoretical reflections are productively complemented by empirical investigations of non-canonical and popular artistic expressions and by discussions of the position of women in Bourdieu's thought.