In: Bourdieu, P The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. London, Melbourne, Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul.īourdieu, P ( 1993a ) Principles for a sociology of cultural works (trans. London and New York: Routledge.īourdieu, P ( 1986 ) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.īennett, T, Savage, M, Silva, E, Warde, A, Gayo-Cal, M, Wright, D ( 2009) Culture, Class, Distinction.

Book History 3: 155– 165.īennett, T, Emmison, M, Frow, J ( 1999) Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures. European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(3): 129– 145.īell, B ( 2000) Beyond the death of the author: Matthew Arnold’s two audiences, 1888-1930. Poetics Today 29(3): 473– 523.Īllington, D ( 2011) Distinction, intentions, and the consumption of fiction: Negotiating cultural legitimacy in a gay reading group. Journal of Literary Semantics 35(2): 123– 144.Īllington, D ( 2008) How to do things with literature: Blasphemous speech acts, satanic intentions, and the uncommunicativeness of verses. It is argued that a long-standing tradition of association between descriptive writing and visual art has served as a resource both for consumers and for producers in distinguishing literature from popular fiction.Īllington, D ( 2006) First steps towards a rhetorical psychology of literary interpretation. In order to understand this association, the analysis then turns to two paragraphs from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl (2000 ), which had been read by most of the groups involved and which many group members had referred to as involving ‘description’.

Quantitative and qualitative analysis of reading group (or ‘book club’) discussions reveals an association between descriptive writing, cultural legitimacy, and a focus on the form, rather than the content, of fictional texts. Its purpose is to investigate the social production of literary value, potentially providing cultural sociology with a systematic means by which to study the formal features of texts in relation to their social significance: a means arguably required by (but not necessarily supplied in) the work of Pierre Bourdieu.

This article proposes a form of research that integrates reader study with textual analysis.

The pearl john steinbeck citation