David Swartz

The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

Culture and Power

Pierre Bourdieu is one of the world's most important social theorists and is also one of the great empirical researchers in contemporary sociology. However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available. David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work—the complex relationship between culture and power—and explains that sociology for Bourdieu is a mode of political intervention. Swartz clarifies Bourdieu's difficult concepts, noting where they have been misinterpreted by critics and where they have fallen short in resolving important analytical issues. The book also shows how Bourdieu has synthesized his theory of practices and symbolic power from Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and how his work was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser. Culture and Power is the first book to offer both a sympathetic and critical examination of Bourdieu's work and it will be invaluable to social scientists as well as to a broader audience in the humanities.

The metaphysical outrage and indignation contained within these verses, for the most part formal yet seething with fury, has its only parallel in Wilfred Owen's terrible indictments of the first Great War. There is a significant difference, however. The poet's torment is expressed in the face of God and His Creation and not simply humankind's personal handiwork. The lure of Swartz's "Hothouse" is how dangerously it verges on disintegration and madness. The trial, simply stated, is why, a boundless WHY? hurled into abyss. Only more fearful is the implied silence, the calculated indifference of the answer. The four long poems comprising Part Two are a lull in the rage of the opening section. The poet, while certainly not at ease with his Maker's universe, attempts, even, to entertain, while having his own private jokes with Bard Himself. Part Three includes two representative dramatic poems. The first, "Last Supper," depicts the final moments of Christopher Marlowe, the second, "The Hitler Sonata," those of Adolf Hitler, a disturbing, powerful read. If Plath confronted demons in her brilliant final anguish, the author of THESE skillful, wrenching poems assails the very source of them. One cannot leave this book behind.

[Selected Verse]

Autumn in the Hothouse And Other Poems

The Magnificent Obsession

The title work in this volume is truly the narrative of a SPLICE, that is, the conjoined, rejoined, temporary, temporarily, sanity of a man-deeply fragmented, wounded by his era, having fled employment and household out of dread and profound depression-who, arriving at the old cannabis buddy's hometown, of all potential oases on a harsh Jehovah's earth.Des Moines, Iowa having sought sustenance and support and having received the total sum of both-negotiates seven weeks of respite in an employment program and the loving arms of a wonderfully endowed African-American (black) "older woman" to eventually "deconstruct" i.e., implode toward his formally diagnosed "schizoid affective"chaos and misery and again, flight-return at last to the arms of his estranged, long-suffering helpmate and wife, bride of a dozen years-and there with no certain resolution or promise on any imaginable horizon, terminate this terrible, non-redemptive, dark and foreboding, utterly idiosyncratic, fictive phase of his living.SPLICE, and the stranger Dinner Party and Adam and Evan, are indeed fictions yet are truer than real. Darker than the necessary. More amusing than credulous. Sensitive than credible. Valid than factual. Sudden than visual. Important than published. Greater than read. Larger than critiqued. Scarier than privilege. Tender-even the concluding apocalyptic parody-tender-the very last brush of a butterfly's wing.

David Swartz

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