Hacia una sociología de la literatura descentralizada: notas y comentarios a la teoría bourdieusiana desde la periferia

This paper draws from the international circulation of the concepts and theory developed by Pierre Bourdieu to reexamine, from a literary perspective, the notion of autonomy, given the multiple objections and challenges that appear when approaching peripheral literary fields. We argue that in a significant variety of historical and geographical contexts, the heteronomous factor, be it political or economic, permeates the functioning of the literary field in a decisive way. As illustrated through some examples from Soviet and Latin American literature, there is a need to refine the categories used to think the literary field and its relations to other fields of activity, other national literary fields and different scales. To that end, we delve into some recent proposals formulated to (re)define the key notions of field theory. From here, we hint at more flexible uses of the theory that would allow its application to different geographical contexts and new scales of analysis in order to develop the modelization of field variation.