ABSTRACT
In recent years the theoretical ground for the study of literary texts has undergone significant alterations. The basically interpretative structuralist and post-structuralist heories that take the internal qualities of a particular text as their starting point have begun to yield their positions to sociocentric theories that see texts as objects of exchange and symbolic action in a much broader social process. Building on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu in particular, the sociocentric theories have been remarkably successful in explaining how, for instance, symbolic values come to be allocated to particular texts - while the structuralist approach explains the literariness of a work through its own intrinsic qualities, the sociocentric approach discards these and describes the process of social practices that raise some texts to the status of 'literary masterpieces' and suppress others. While originally developed as an analysis of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century cultural practices, this theory has proved to be remarkably successful also, for example, in discussions of contemporary art and thus claims much broader validity. For the student of non-European cultural traditions, the assets of the sociocentric approach are obvious: since there are no universal aesthetic standards, generalizations are much more readily available for processes that are analysed as basically social phenomena. So, while some cultures see beauty in symmetry and others prefer extravagant forms, the power games in the art worlds of both kinds are more readily describable in the same generic terms.
