Bourdieu

Prof. Williams
E370



BOURDIEU READING QUESTIONS

1. According to the editors’ overview of Bourdieu’s life and work, what does he argue is the relationship between taste and social inequality?

2. Bourdieu distinguishes his “intellectualist theory of artistic perception” to an “enchanted experience of culture.” What’s the difference? Who experiences enchantment?

3. How has the emergence of art that increasingly contains reference to the history of art served to reinforce the economy of cultural capital?

4. How does Bourdieu distinguish the expectations for art of working-class people from Kant’s expectations for a judgment of the beautiful?

5. How would you explain in your own words the meaning of Bourdieu’s pithy lesson “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (a phrase we may identify as a slogan for his argument in Distinction).

 Print

02-22-11