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Bourdieu’s Inheritors. The Return of Class Issues in Contemporary French Literature

Subject Area European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
Term from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 449669912
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

The aim of the project was to systematically investigate the reception of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological work and social engagement in the current literary field, paying particular attention to the literary-aesthetic dimensions of the texts. Three groups of texts were analysed: a) autosociobiographies with direct reference to Bourdieu, b) novels that deal in particular with structural change in the post-industrial peripheral regions of France with a rather indirect recourse to Bourdieu’s concepts and c) social novels that embed Bourdieu’s remarks on the social distinction of the bourgeois elites in contemporary narratives. In all three groups, both the socio-critical discourses according to Bourdieu and narrative modes were analysed, i.e. it was not only about the plot, but also about the narratological issues. With regard to the first group, it is significant that the narrative of social advancement is divided into narrative passages relating to the author’s autobiography and analytical sections reflecting the quasi-neo-feudal power structures of the social space. In this context, the auto-diegetic voice in these texts also plays an important role, as the “I” of these texts corresponds to what Bourdieu described as a ‘habitus clivé’ (2002). The division into narrating and narrated self takes this concept of split habitus into account. The other two groups of texts also largely dispense with omnicient narrative voices. By choosing hetero-diegetic narrative voices with internal focalisation, an inner perspective is staged that comes close to the ideal of Flaubert’s deus absconditus, which in turn inspired Bourdieu’s work La misère du monde (1993). Just as in the texts presented under a), the auto-diegetic focus is instrumentalised in order to depict the divided habitus of the transclass subject, it can be observed for the second group that the personal focus, together with its feigned introspection, assumes a kind of ‘authentication function’ of the narrative in order to reproduce the precarious status of the characters and their milieus in an ‘unfiltered’ way, as Bourdieu intended with the help of a study designed from a bottom-up perspective. In the third group of texts, the renunciation of the omniscient narrator in turn serves to frame the new class struggles – in the sense of Bourdieu's dictum that the real is relational – from multiple perspectives. Thus, the relationality of the ruling and ruled classes becomes much more explosive.

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