The European Literary Field: Cultural Brokers and Boundary Practices

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Lahusen
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 454018841

Cultural globalisation and regional integration have altered the circulation of literature and reshaped the chances readers have to access new and diverse cultural perspectives. In the EuroLit project, we have traced the formation of an autonomous European literary field, showing how European integration opened socio-spatial boundaries between national literary fields of European countries by promoting exchange among them and by limiting the intensity of external book circulation. However, EuroLit findings suggest a more complex picture because processes of internal integration are accompanied by persistent book exchanges across external boundaries. This creates the puzzling situation where the European field becomes more established while its external boundaries remain significantly porous. This renewal proposal aims to push the analysis of EuroLit a step further by conducting a systematic examination of the European field’s external boundaries, thus allowing us to better comprehend its coincident openness and closure. We have developed a theoretical framework that combines transnational field theory with insights from research on boundary work and cultural brokerage, proposing to analyse the opening and closing of the European field’s external boundary as the result of the variation in the boundary practices of cultural brokers. The objectives of the renewal proposal are to (1) catalogue European cultural brokers and boundary practices, (2) identify associations between brokers’ field positions and practices, and, thereby, (3) explain the opening and closing of the European literary field’s boundary. To this end, the renewal proposal implements a work programme with a mixed-methods research design that maintains and enriches EuroLit’s methodology. The first work package conducts a quantitative cross-country comparative study of the literary fields in six countries (France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Spain, the UK), thus focusing on privileged sites of struggle over the European field‘s external boundaries, to establish links between boundary practices and broker positions. The second work package conducts a qualitative case study of cultural brokers in Germany with additional interviews in the other countries to identify the variety of brokers, the repertoires of boundary practices, and the rationales that underlie their activation. The third and final work package capitalises on the complementarity of the qualitative and quantitative work to develop explanations for the variation of boundary practices across field positions and to assess the consequences of this variation for the opening and closing of the European field. The renewal proposal thereby addresses a neglected research topic and develops a research agenda that significantly contributes to ongoing debates on cultural globalisation and that advances theorising on transnational fields, cultural brokerage, and boundary work.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants