Room of the works
The concept of the space of works is a specialist term in the sociology of literature. It is embedded in that part of the art sociology of the French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu , which deals with the literary business as a literary field and its development using the historical example of French national literature .
What is meant by the 'space of works' is the manifest level of literary communication, i. H. the discursive stringing together as well as the coexistence of the totality of all literary works existing at a certain point in time as well as all statements about literary works and their production or reception. Bourdieu also describes these acts of utterance as 'statements' or 'position statements', which are in complex and in principle competitive interrelationships. However, the structure of the space of the works does not emerge solely sui generis, but in mutual dependence on the space of positions and the space of possibilities , i.e. H. depending on the socio-economic status of an actor compared to other actors engaged in the literary field as well as depending on the opportunities perceived by an actor with regard to artistically meaningful future moves in the literary field.
In order to reconstruct the structure of the space of the works in terms of the sociology of literature, stylistic and genre-systemic analysis categories are available. Depending on the research interest, however, other criteria can also be applied, which gives the theoretical construct a high degree of practical scientific applicability.
Occasionally, in the German translations of the texts relevant to Bourdieu's sociology of literature , the term "room of statements" is used instead of the term "room of works". Apparently this distinction is not based on the nuances in the use of the term envisaged by Bourdieu, but only on a lack of coordination among the translators of the works of the French sociologist.
literature
- Pierre Bourdieu: The rules of art. Genesis and structure of the literary field. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-58264-X .