Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (review)

The late Pierre Bourdieu made significant contributions to literary and cultural studies, especially with his concepts of cultural capital, habitus, and field. Of his two dozen books (all but a few translated into English), several remain widely cited, including the co-authored Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1970), Outline of a Theory of [End Page 184] Practice (1972), most notably Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), and Homo Academicus (1984). It is as a sociologist of culture and as an alternative to mainstream poststructuralism that Bourdieu made his reputation during the heyday of French theory. The posthumous publication of his peculiar “autobiography,” Outline for an Auto-Analysis, provides an insider’s account of contemporary French intellectual history, and a portrait of the famous sociologist as a pugnacious and melancholy, divided soul.