SOURCE: Collins, James. “Language, Subjectivity, and Social Dynamics in the Writings of Pierre Bourdieu.” American Literary History 10, no. 4 (winter 1998): 725-32.

In the following essay, Collins describes Bourdieu's ideas regarding the role of literature in society.

Pierre Bourdieu's arguments about forms of capital have provided the foundations for an important series of analyses of social reproduction that rightly emphasize the prominence of educational systems in modern social dynamics. There is value in finding out how social-symbolic “capitals,” variously defined, operate within and across different national systems of social stratification. As Bourdieu has remarked, the concept of capital(s) is one way of capturing history in social analysis. While critics have accurately characterized Bourdieu as more a theorist of reproduction than of transformation, the analyses of cultural, linguistic, social, and economic capitals he offers in Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power (1994), Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1977), and Homo...