Explore the vast range of titles available.

Literary pedagogy occupied a privileged place in Bourdieu's early work on education insofar as he saw it as exemplifying in unconscious mode socially segregational dynamics. Bourdieu's expressly 'reductionist' critique was uncannily mirrored, however, by the spread of more economically instrumental approaches to education. Bourdieu's engagement with these led him to develop a fuller apprehension of literature. Yet while the conceptual apparatus he developed can allow the genesis of a literary work in its socio-historical complexity to be grasped more fully, its framing poses significant problems of its own. In particular, its 'hypercontextualizing' injunctions risk stifling ordinary reading practices and the practical pedagogy of canon-formation. Bourdieu's actual practice with literary materials is not bound by these injunctions. His transepochal 'collaboration' with Blaise Pascal, for example, takes place through the insinuation of decontextualised shards of thought into his own writing. The teachings of literature exceed in various ways their scientific framing.

This article is based on a number of texts written by Michel de Certeau between around 1969 and 1974. These texts all explore the ways in which a lucid Christian belief may endure as a resource in contemporary societies. They also indicate a form of transition. In comparison to the probing but orthodoxly circumscribed analyses of L’Etranger, ou Bunion dans la différence (1969), we see the emergence of a more open (more exposed but also freer) mode of reflection. Although Certeau would rarely return in his writings after the mid-1970’s to the question of contemporary Christian belief as such, the analytic and figurative frameworks generated by this reflection continue to inform his thought. They help us to make sense of the apparently disparate heterogeneity of his subsequent publications, taking us as they do in a series of significant zigzags between, say, The Writing of History, The Mystic Fable and The Practice of Everyday Life . Christianity was, in Certeau’s view, in the process of ‘shattering’. While this may have seemed a provocative diagnosis in 1974, it appears today as a basic premiss for a scrupulous sociological analysis. Moreover, Certeau suggests that there is nothing intrinsically new about this process. He recalls elsewhere the major scissions already at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Christendom broke ‘into pieces’, producing here and there new generations of believers ‘without a church’. What is unprecedented, he argues, is now the sheer extent and scale of this shattering. This development is not necessarily synonymous with an imminent extinction of Christian belief, but does modify radically the conditions in which such belief must find a voice and a horizon for action.

Gudridge reviews \"Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other\" by Jeremy Ahearne.

\"Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other\" by Jeremy Ahearne is reviewed.

Dix ans après sa mort, il a paru opportun d'évoquer la réception intellectuelle et éditoriale dont bénéficie l'oeuvre de Michel de Certeau, de rappeler les divers pans d'une oeuvre protéiforme qui fait de lui un penseur aussi inventif qu'inclassable. Cherchant avec constance à ne pas se laisser immobiliser dans un canton du savoir ou de l'espace social, il a privilégié la figure du \"voyageur\".

Dix ans après sa mort, il a paru opportun d'évoquer la réception intellectuelle et éditoriale dont bénéficie l'œuvre de Michel de Certeau, de rappeler les divers pans d'une œuvre protéiforme qui fait de lui un penseur aussi inventif qu'inclassable. Cherchant avec constance à ne pas se laisser immobiliser dans un canton du savoir ou de l'espace social, il a privilégié la figure du « voyageur ».