Fields and Fragments: Bourdieu, Pascal and the Teachings of Literature

Literary pedagogy occupied a privileged place in Bourdieu’s early work on education insofar as he saw it as exemplifying in unconscious mode socially segregational dynamics. Bourdieu’s expressly ‘reductionist’ critique was uncannily mirrored, however, by the spread of more economically instrumental approaches to education. Bourdieu’s engagement with these led him to develop a fuller apprehension of literature. Yet while the conceptual apparatus he developed can allow the genesis of a literary work in its socio-historical complexity to be grasped more fully, its framing poses significant problems of its own. In particular, its ‘hypercontextualizing’ injunctions risk stifling ordinary reading practices and the practical pedagogy of canon-formation. Bourdieu’s actual practice with literary materials is not bound by these injunctions. His transepochal ‘collaboration’ with Blaise Pascal, for example, takes place through the insinuation of decontextualised shards of thought into his own writing. The teachings of literature exceed in various ways their scientific framing.