Speakers
Description
In Pierre Bourdieu and Axel Honneth’s terms, the literary realm is underpinned by a fierce “struggle for recognition” that structures the field in terms of unequal relations of power, cultural prestige, and public visibility. In line with this sociological perspective, literary success is not the direct result of the aesthetical merits of writings, but should be conceived as deriving from the broader nexus characterizing the structured relations of power within the field, the latter itself being embedded into larger intertwining socio-political, economic, and political contexts. Taking inspiration from Honneth’s term used to theorize the politics of recognition played out within the literary field, we advance the concept of “struggle for canonization” to understand the politics of posterity in the public memory regarding literary figures. Methodologically, we examine the statistical presence of literary figures in the Romanian street nomenclature at the national level, based on a complete collection of urban street names totalizing around 50,000 cases. Next, focusing on the sample of street names dedicated to writers (novelists, poets, and literary critics), we perform several types of statistical analyses that reveal the institutionalization of literature in the Romanian street networks in terms of gender, region, and ethnic identity.
| Presenting author | Mihai S. Rusu |
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