Humanist Commitment: A New Habitus

Abstract

“[I]n the space of the artistic field as in social space,” Bourdieu notes, “distances between styles or lifestyles are never better measured than in terms of time” (Bourdieu, 2006, pp. 158–159). In the 20-odd years that lie between the publication of Khoury’s or al-Daif’s first novels and the heyday of a second generation of war novels in the early 2000s, many things have changed in Lebanon. One of these changes, of negligible importance in the grand scheme of things but of major relevance to this study, concerns the social milieu from which emanate Lebanon’s novelists. Eventually, it is a change in their habitus that opens up to a new generation of writers a different space of possibles, the opportunity to write something that sets them apart from the established figures of the field, and “leave their mark” in the struggle for recognition in the literary field.