Literature is Not Just a Battlefield

It is impossible nowadays to discuss literary creation as a sociologist without taking an explicit position on the theory of the literary field, as a particular version of the general theory of fields. This task becomes all the more difficult as the ostensible ambition of this theory is to consider not only those dimensions of the literary world most commonly recognized as “social” (the literary and social trajectories of writers; the spatial structure of literary positions and struggles for symbolic domination; the social inception of literary institutions like publishing companies, literary series, and journals; editorial strategies, movements, trends, and schools of thought; manifestos and literary expressions of every kind; and the role of all those, ranging from publishers to critics, educational institutions to the media, and sponsors of literary awards, who contribute to establishing the value of a work), but also to approach works through their most specifically literary aspects (such as themes, composition, and style).