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
