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Below and Above the Nation: Bourdieu, Hispanism, and Literary History

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Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture

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Abstract

This chapter examines the relevance of place to the development of Spanish literary historiography as a field. It draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s form versus function duality to reveal an often-ignored aspect of histories of Spanish literature: their introjection of Europe’s north/south division to assess and categorize regional differences. Originally formulated to explain the creation of an autonomous cultural field in France, the form/function duality frequently translates as north/south in the work of twentieth-century Spanish literary historians. As such, it clues us into links between class, aesthetics, and place that subordinate the southern region of Andalusia to the central region of Castile. This perspective reveals how centralizing nationalism marginalizes regional literary fields not only on linguistic grounds (Catalan, Basque, Galician versus “Spanish”) but also by establishing connections between the south and the function-driven working class and then opposing it to disinterested taste and aesthetic form, associated with Castile.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984), 10.

  2. 2.

    Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–43.

  3. 3.

    Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas,” in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Shusterman (London: Blackwell, 1999), 220–28. Pascale Casanova’s notion of a world republic of letters seeks to detach Bourdieu’s field analysis from a strictly national focalization, but her approach does not question the centrality of the French literary field . See Pascale Casanova , The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  4. 4.

    Alejandro Mejías-López , The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010), 53.

  5. 5.

    According to Romero Tobar, the “final result” of this regionalist perspective is the “shrinking [jibarización] of the nineteenth-century idea of ‘national literature.’” See Leonardo Romero Tobar, “Entre 1898 y 1998: la historiografía de la literatura española,” RILCE: Revista de Filología Hispánica 15.1 (1999), 32. On regional literary historiography in Spain, see José-Carlos Mainer , “Literatura nacional y literaturas regionales,” in Literaturas regionales en España: historia y crítica, ed. José María Enguita Utrilla and José Carlos Mainer (Zaragoza: Institución “Fernando el Católico,” 1994), 7–19.

  6. 6.

    Mario Santana, “Mapping National Literatures: Some Observations on Contemporary Hispanism,” in Spain beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, ed. Brad Epps and Luis Fernández-Cifuentes (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), 112.

  7. 7.

    Metacritical aspects regarding the uses, categories, and even the very possibility of literary historiography have been widely addressed in recent years. See Linda Hutcheon Mario J. Valdés, ed., Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Marshall Brown, The Uses of Literary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

  8. 8.

    On the relevance of the north/south dialectics for the configuration of the modern idea of Europe, see Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (In Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

  9. 9.

    Friedrich Bouterwek, History of Spanish Literature, trans. Thomasina Ross (London: David Bogue, 1847), 1.

  10. 10.

    J.C.L. Sismondi, Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe, trans. Thomas Roscoe, 4 vols. (London: H. Colburn and Co., 1823), 103. For a review of these early histories of Spanish literature written by foreigners, see Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s introduction to the Spanish translation of James Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s A History of Spanish Literature (1898; Spanish translation 1901): “Prólogo,” Historia de la literatura española desde los orígenes hasta el año 1900, by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, trans. Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín (Madrid: La España Moderna, 1901), v–xlii. For a more recent critical appraisal, see Wadda C. Ríos-Font, “Literary History and Canon Formation,” in Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 15–35.

  11. 11.

    On the institutionalization of Spanish literature through public education, see Gabriel Nuñez Ruiz, La educación literaria. Modelos historiográficos, las humanidades en el bachillerato, literatura infantil y propuestas didácticas (Madrid: Nancea, 2001). On orientalist appreciations of Spanish literature among Spanish scholars, see James T. Monroe, Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (Sixteenth Century to the Present) (Leiden: Brill, 1970) and Luce López-Baralt, Islam in Spanish Literature: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Andrew Hurley (Leiden: Brill, 1992).

  12. 12.

    Antonio Gil de Zárate , Manual de literatura. Resumen histórico de la literatura española (Madrid: Boix, 1844), 1: 14–15. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish are my own.

  13. 13.

    Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 48.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 196.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 78.

  16. 16.

    For an analysis of the role of education in the reproduction of class differences, see Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education , Society, and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1977).

  17. 17.

    Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 3.

  18. 18.

    Immanuel Kant , Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 100.

  19. 19.

    Immanuel Kant , Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 218.

  20. 20.

    Joan Ramón Resina , “Hispanism and Its Discontents,” Siglo XX/20th Century 4 (1996), 114.

  21. 21.

    See Inman Fox, La invención de España. Nacionalismo liberal e identidad nacional (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997), especially the chapter “El estado y la cultura nacional: El Centro de Estudios Históricos y la obra de Menéndez Pidal,” 97–110, for details on the nationalization of Spanish culture and history at the Centro.

  22. 22.

    Ramón Menéndez Pidal , “Caracteres primordiales de la literatura española,” in Los españoles en la historia y en la literatura (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1951), 173.

  23. 23.

    Menéndez Pidal , “Caracteres,” 185.

  24. 24.

    Ramón Menéndez Pidal , The Spaniards in Their History, trans. Walter Starkie (London: Hollis and Carter, 1950), 121.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 171.

  26. 26.

    Ramón Menéndez Pidal , Orígenes del español. Estado lingüístico de la Península Ibérica hasta el siglo XI (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1950), 486.

  27. 27.

    Ramón Menéndez Pidal , “La lengua española,” Hispania 1 (1918), 2–3.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 5. On the Andalusian origin of American Spanish, see José del Valle, “Andalucismo, poligénesis y koineización: dialectología e ideología,” Hispanic Review 66.2 (1998), 131–49.

  29. 29.

    José Carlos Mainer , Historia, literatura, sociedad (y una coda española) (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2000), 318.

  30. 30.

    Bourdieu, Distinction, 30.

  31. 31.

    José Ortega y Gasset , Obras completas, 12 vols. (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1946–1983), 6: 116.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 6: 119.

  33. 33.

    Pedro Salinas , Obras completas, ed. Enric Bou, 3 vols. (Madrid: Cátedra, 2007), 3: 63.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 3: 155.

  35. 35.

    Sebastiaan Faber , Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–1975 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 48.

  36. 36.

    Guillermo Díaz-Plaja , ed., Historia general de las literaturas hispánicas, 6 vols. (Barcelona: Vergara, 1949–1968).

  37. 37.

    Guillermo Díaz-Plaja , Modernismo frente a 98. Una introducción a la literatura española del siglo XX (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1979).

  38. 38.

    See José María Pozuelo Yvancos and Rosa María Adrada Sánchez, Teoría del canon y literatura española (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000), especially the chapter “Canon literario y canon sociológico: la propuesta de Bourdieu,” 105–120, and Mainer , Historia, literatura, sociedad.

  39. 39.

    José Carlos Mainer , Historia de la literatura española, 9 vols. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2010–2012), 1: ix. In 1999, Paul Julian Smith proposed Bourdieu’s sociology of culture as the common theoretical and methodological ground where Spanish and Anglo-American versions of Hispanism should meet. According to Smith , “cultural studies (and more particularly the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) offer a common ground or lingua franca for Hispanists in Spain and abroad, most particularly in its attempt to integrate the historical and the theoretical.” See Smith , “Towards a Cultural Studies of the Spanish State,” Paragraph 22.1 (1999), 9. See Smith’s The Moderns, Time, Space, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Spanish Practices. Literature, Cinema, Television (Oxford: Legenda, 2012) for illustrations of his theoretical proposals.

  40. 40.

    Mainer , Historia de la literatura española, 1: vii.

  41. 41.

    Cabo Aseguinolaza, El lugar de la literatura española (Barcelona: Crítica, 2012) [Vol. 9 of Mainer, Historia], 403.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 56–64.

  43. 43.

    César Domínguez addresses this issue, but does not make it the focus of his analysis, which engages with supranational rather than subnational phenomena. As Domínguez puts it, “as Spain’s ‘orient,’ Andalusia functions as an internal other to Castile .” See “The South-European Orient: A Comparative Reflection on Space in Literary History,” Modern Language Quarterly 67:4 (2006), 433.

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  1. Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

    José Luis Venegas

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  1. Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

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Venegas, J.L. (2018). Below and Above the Nation: Bourdieu, Hispanism, and Literary History. In: Sánchez Prado, I. (eds) Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71809-5_10

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