Date: Wed, 27 Dec 1995 22:51:59 -0600
From: mbw3-AT-midway.uchicago.edu (Mark Wolff)
Subject: MLA session on Bourdieu


Dear everyone,

This message may find no one who can benefit from it, but if there is
anyone on this list in Chicago who will attend the MLA convention tomorrow,
they might be interested in attending a session entitled "Baudrillard,
Bourdieu, Finkelkraut, and the Interpretation of Culture" which will take
place Thursday, Dec. 28 at 1:45 in Chicago Ballroom D, Chicago Marriott
(according to the conference program).  I bring this to everyone's
attention because there has been some discussion on Bourdieu's idea of the
role of the intellectual in society.  The session tomorrow should touch on
this subject, given the public declarations of solidarity by Bourdieu and
other intellectuals for the workers on strike in France.

I would also like to take this chance to contribute to the list instead of
my usual practice of lurking and listening in.  My thesis is an attempt to
understand how 19th-century "popular" literature which is no longer read
today was meaningful for those who originally produced and consumed it.  I
focus on an author named Gabriel Ferry who wrote the first western novel in
French (believe it or not, western novels were quite popular in France
during the 2nd half of the 19th century).  I'm using Bourdieu to overcome
the dichotomy between the sociology of literature and sociocriticism;  both
want to look at the social dimension of literature, but the former
concentrates on social context while the latter focuses solely on the text.
By confronting the usual classification that pegs Gabriel Ferry's works as
"popular" or "entertainment" literature (the French have come up with a
nifty euphemism: paraliterature), I hope to get at how generic categories
indicate cultural hierarchies in the Bourdieuian sense of "prises de
position" (forgive me, I'm a student of French and I don't have Pierre in
translation, except for IRS).  So, to keep this short, one of the things
I'm looking at is the importation of the western genre into France
(following the success of Fenimore Cooper) and its evolution as more
writers evinced different "takes" on the genre.  Another is how genres are
created by instituted reading practices, such as literature marketed
exclusively for train travelers who needed something to read during their
journeys.  Ultimately, I want to show that works by writers such as Gabriel
Ferry fell out of critical favor because they didn't fit into the project
of a national secular literature (that last bit may be too much for one
chapter in a dissertation, but that's the direction in which I'm headed).

Thanks for your time, maybe I'll see some of you at the MLA session tomorrow.

************************************************************

Mark Wolff
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
University of Chicago
1050 East 59th Street
Chicago, Illinois  60637

Phone:  (312) 752-7833
email:  mbw3-AT-ellis.uchicago.edu

************************************************************