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Mapping the Public of a Literature Festival with MCA: Overall Cultural Capital vs. Specific Literary Capital

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Part of the book series: Methodos Series ((METH,volume 15))

Abstract

In France, festival audiences offer a space in which to examine the transformations of cultural practices in the last 20 years, besides the national quantitative surveys on these issues. The sociological survey that we undertook during the 2011 edition of the Les Correspondances de Manosque festival1 aimed to explore this new form of cultural mediation in the reading sector and its role in the literary field Indeed, this festival enables different types of mediation between the literary market and audiences who, on the whole, are endowed with a considerable amount of cultural capital - both reading a great deal as well as frequently going out - but whose types of cultural capital and practices differ. This research, drawing on an MCA based on festivalgoers’ practices, tastes and social characteristics, thus allows us to distinguish a specific kind of cultural capital: literary capital, that festivals uphold and help flourish.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The authors would like to thank the festival’s organizers for their help, as well as Brigitte Le Roux, Jean-Louis Fabiani and Julien Duval for their insightful comments on the questionnaire and MCA. Hélène Seiler-Juilleret, Aude Servais, and Jasmine Van Deventer contributed to the survey, and Pernelle Issenhuth helped prepare and analyze the data.

  2. 2.

    These elements are characteristic of the consumption habits of people with important amounts of cultural capital: “they seek out diverse, educational, informative experiences that allow them to achieve competence, acquire knowledge, and express themselves creatively” (Holt 1998: 17).

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Picaud, M., Pacouret, J., Sapiro, G. (2019). Mapping the Public of a Literature Festival with MCA: Overall Cultural Capital vs. Specific Literary Capital. In: Blasius, J., Lebaron, F., Le Roux, B., Schmitz, A. (eds) Empirical Investigations of Social Space. Methodos Series, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15387-8_14

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