Introduction : Bourdieu and the literary field

Pierre Bourdieu’s range as a thinker was extremely wide, and it would be misleading to present him primarily as a literary theorist. Trained as a philosopher, he became the leading French sociologist of his generation, and brought under the spotlight of his ‘critical sociology’ a whole series of institutional and discursive universes (education, art, linguistics, public administration, politics, philosophy, journalism, economics and others). Far from representing an intellectual dispersal, these manifold objects of enquiry allowed him to develop and refine a comprehensive theory of social process and power-relations based on distinctive concepts such as ‘field’, ‘habitus’, variously conceived notions of ‘capital’, and ‘illusio’ (all these concepts and others will be explicated and assessed in this issue). Yet Bourdieu’s analyses were scarcely ever received as neutral descriptions within the fields which he analysed. Bourdieu’s abiding agenda was to show how the discursive presuppositions and institutional logics at work in such fields carried but also masked certain social logics that a ‘critical sociology’ could disclose. Coupled with the inveterately combative drive seldom absent from Bourdieu’s objectifying analyses—and even setting aside the misprisions to which an external analyst is inevitably subject—this helps explain the resistance which his work recurrently provoked. In this respect, Bourdieu’s forays into the world of literary studies and his reception therein can be seen as part of a wider pattern

The Literary Field in California: A Report to the James Irvine Foundation: Executive Summary

Provides a scan of the nonprofit literary field in California, with an emphasis on literary presenters and writers. Prepared by Poets & Writers, Inc

Introduction

In the course of the nineteenth century the study of literature was professionalized. There was a concerted attempt to make the study of literature an academic pursuit, ‘a particular branch of learning or science’, to turn it into ‘literary studies’ or, as it was called in German, Literaturwissenschaft. 1 This attempt was ultimately successful in the sense that literary studies became a recognized and established discipline within the new Humboldtian kind of university. However, this success brought troubles of its own. Among other things, the arrival of the academic discipline of literary studies not only required a method of study but also a determinate field of study. In order to delimit such a field, a clear and well-defined concept of literature was needed. This meant that academic literary studies would have to transform, for its own specific purposes, such concepts as ‘literary work’ and ‘literary text’ as well as the concept of ‘literature’, from broad, vague, non-theoretical, everyday notions into something like well-designed theoretical tools. Though it has not always been recognized, this transformation has presented a major theoretical problem for literary studies, and it is arguable that to this day no satisfactory solution has been found

'Getting out of the closet': Scientific authorship of literary fiction and knowledge transfer

Some scientists write literary fiction books in their spare time. If these books contain scientific knowledge, literary fiction becomes a mechanism of knowledge transfer. In this case, we could conceptualize literary fiction as non-formal knowledge transfer. We model knowledge transfer via literary fiction as a function of the type of scientist (academic or non-academic) and his/her scientific field. Academic scientists are those employed in academia and public research organizations whereas non-academic scientists are those with a scientific background employed in other sectors. We also distinguish between direct knowledge transfer (the book includes the scientist's research topics), indirect knowledge transfer (scientific authors talk about their research with cultural agents) and reverse knowledge transfer (cultural agents give scientists ideas for future research). Through mixed-methods research and a sample from Spain, we find that scientific authorship accounts for a considerable percentage of all literary fiction authorship. Academic scientists do not transfer knowledge directly so often as non-academic scientists, but the former engage into indirect and reverse transfer knowledge more often than the latter. Scientists from History stand out in direct knowledge transfer. We draw propositions about the role of the academic logic and scientific field on knowledge transfer via literary fiction. We advance some tentative conclusions regarding the consideration of scientific authorship of literary fiction as a valuable knowledge transfer mechanism.Comment: Paper published in Journal of Technology Transfe

Foreword to John\u27s Gospel in New Perspective

Over the last half century or more of Johannine scholarship, three issues have been of primary critical concern. One subject of interest has been the literary origin and composition of the Fourth Gospel. A second has been the application of new-literary analyses to the Johannine narrative, wherein the literary artistry and rhetorical design of the text is studied in order to discern how John’s message is conveyed in the interest of better understanding what is being said. A third area of interest has been a sustained interest in the Johannine situation, seeking to learn more about the history of Johannine Christianity. This field of inquiry provides a means of coming to grips with what issues were being faced by the Johannine hearers and readers, helping interpreters better understand how John’s story of Jesus was crafted as a means of addressing issues contemporary with the evangelist and his audience. It is within this third field of inquiry that Richard Cassidy’s book, John’s Gospel in New Perspective, makes an important contribution that is especially relevant to studies of empire and early Christianit

Know Your Audience: Middlebrow aesthetic and literary positioning in the fiction of P.G. Wodehouse

This essay strives to explain Wodehouse’s status as a popular writer, whose work is read with enjoyment by academics, critics and the general reader alike, as resulting from his particular positioning within the literary field, scrutinizing his relationship to both popular commercial fiction and avant-garde literary output. It argues that Wodehouse as a writer of enduring popularity and yet non-canonical status fits in with a range of critical discourses of the middlebrow, both modern and contemporary

A graph-based mathematical morphology reader

This survey paper aims at providing a "literary" anthology of mathematical morphology on graphs. It describes in the English language many ideas stemming from a large number of different papers, hence providing a unified view of an active and diverse field of research

The Chronotope and the Study of Literary Adaptation : The Case of Robinson Crusoe

This paper proposes a reflection on the potential of the chronotope as a heuristic tool in the field of adaptation studies. My goal is to situate the chronotope in the context of adaptation studies, specifically with regard to perhaps the most central treatise in the field of literary adaptation, Gérard Genette’s “Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree”, and to draw attention to perhaps one of the most overlooked works in the field of adaptation studies, Caryl Emerson’s chronotope-inspired “Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme”. I will demonstrate how the chronotope might be used in the study of literary adaptation by examining the relationships between Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”, its historical sources, and Michel Tournier’s twentieth-century adaptation of the Robinson story, “Friday”. My analysis draws upon three of the semantic levels of the chronotope presented in the introduction to this volume: (1) chronotopic motifs linked to two opposing themes: enthusiasm for European colonial expansionism and skepticism regarding the supremacy of European culture; (2) major chronotopes that determine the narrative structure of a text; and (3) the way in which such major chronotopes may be linked to broader questions of genre