oa Dertig jaar Bourdieu in de neerlandistiek (1980-2010) - Een kwantitatieve verkenning

There is no doubt that the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) has had an influence on the academic study of Dutch literature over the last three decades. An interesting question, however, is: to what extent? Some scholars state that Bourdieu is the most important recent foreign influence on Dutch literary studies, while others consider him and his works (very much) overestimated. In this article, an attempt is made to quantify Bourdieu’s influence by presenting a statistical overview of his work in translation in general and, more particularly, by counting and analyzing the mentions of Bourdieu’s works in journals and other texts since his first appearance in Dutch in 1980. Indeed, Bourdieu turns out to have had, also numerically, a considerable number of citations. Nevertheless it remains difficult to draw final conclusions on this quantitative analysis alone. In further research the comparison with the number of citations of other prominent foreign thinkers in Dutch literary stud„ies should be taken into consideration, and a more substantial qualitative analy„sis should be performed, as well as the role played by ‘intellectual rumour’, as Bourdieu himself called it.