SOURCE: Loesberg, Jonathan. “Bourdieu and the Sociology of Aesthetics.” ELH 60, no. 4 (winter 1993): 1033-56.

In the following essay, Loesberg surveys Bourdieu's theories of cultural and sociological analyses as they pertain to aesthetics.

Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical project begins—not precisely chronologically, but with an intrinsic logic—as the attempt to formulate a method of sociological and anthropological analysis that mediates between simply reproducing the perceptions of the culture studied and a scientific codification of those perceptions that gives them objective shape, but not a shape that corresponds to anything in the workings of that culture.¹ Driven by the exigencies of that project, Bourdieu has ended up defining a series of concepts and concerns that has recently revivified among literary critics and theorists an interest in the sociology of literature. In particular, most centrally in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, he has offered a powerful explication of...