Deconstructing the Cradle of Literature: An Application of Pierre Bourdieu’s “Field” Theory to the Studies of Literary Subjectivity and Local Creative Writing

Different from Northrop Frye, who intends to terminate literary discussions by stressing archetypical analysis, Pierre Bourdieu attracts many interdisciplinary attempts upon his scientific methodology. Although he rarely centralizes the internal value of literature, as he did in an exceptional commentary on Guillaume’s poetry by adopting conventional judgments (descriptive, rhetoric, narrative, and stylistic), his sociological delineation of the objective and habitual mechanism of the literary field and the possibility of change oriented by personal dispositions strikingly reveals a new integrative way to understand the dynamic process of literary formation. Adding Merleau-Ponty phenomenology of perception and perspective of communicative externalization to Bourdieu’s field theory, one can refresh creative writing studies, a discipline merely starting to develop two decades ago. On the one hand, the holistic subjective process of textual production from perception to externalization in the bargaining between capitals, symbols, dispositions, and power can be envisioned. On the other hand, by combining re-centralization of the creative subjects and structural schematization of the literary field (and sub-fields), researchers can formulate practical strategies (a mix of textual analysis, qualitative and quantitative data collection, on-site observation, and so on) to launch a meta-investigation of the efficacy of creative writing exercises in various fields.