ABSTRACT
Literary activity and production are never random practices; rather, they are characterized by a certain logic, with which one must come to terms in order to understand the literary products themselves. That is because a set of certain conditions of production always marks the final product. Pierre Bourdieu’s field concept constitutes-with some necessary modifications and adaptations-a valuable theoretical basis for the description and analysis of the literary activity at al-Ṣāḥib’s court. He defines the literary field thus:
The literary field . . . is an independent social universe with its own laws of functioning, its specific relations of force, its dominants and its dominated, and so forth. Put another way, to speak of “field” is to recall that literary works are produced in a particular social universe endowed with particular institutions and obeying specific laws. . . . It is a veritable social universe where, in accordance with its particular laws, there accumulates a particular form of capital and where relations of force of a particular type are exerted. This universe is the place of entirely specific struggles, notably concerning the question of knowing who is part of the universe, who is a real writer and who is not.1
