Towards a Decentered Sociology of Literature: Notes and Comments to Bourdieusian Theory from the Periphery

Abstract

This paper draws from the international circulation of the concepts and theory developed by Pierre Bourdieu to deepen, from a literary perspective, into the notion of autonomy, given the multiple objections and challenges that surface when approaching peripheral literary fields. We argue that in a significant variety of historical and geographical contexts, the heteronomous factor, be it political or economic, permeates the functioning of the literary field in a decisive way. As illustrated through some examples from the Soviet and Latin American examples, there is a need to refine the categories used to think the literary field and its relations to other fields of activity, to other national literary fields and between different scales. To that end, we delve into some recent proposals formulated to (re)define the key notions of  field theory. From here, we hint at more flexible uses of the theory that would allow its application to dissimilar geographical contexts and new scales of analysis in order to develop the modelization of field variation.