Bourdieu Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field

Translated by Susan Emanuel. — Stanford University Press, 1995. — 408 p.Tackling a major opus by Pierre Bourdieu is particularly daunting since he has been so well served by many previous English translators. lowe a debt to my predecessors; even if I have not always followed their precedents.The Rules of Art is a complex book which spans too many academic fields for any one translator to claim particular expertise. In the Prologue, a reading of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and in the first part, about the conquest of autonomy in the field of cultural production, Bourdieu invites us on a “walk through the woods” of the literary and artistic fields in the second half of the nineteenth century, including byways forgotten even by those well versed in French literary history. Portions of part II, which lays the foundation of what he calls a “science of works of art” and of part III, an analysis of the pure aesthetic and alternatives to it, have appeared previously in a variety of contexts, but they have since been revised in the writing of this work.