Analysis Of Distinction: The Stones Of The Village By Pierre Bourdieu

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In Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), Pierre Bourdieu talks about how different social classes perceive themselves and people of other classes. The petit-bourgeois social class is that section of the working class that struggles to rise, in class, to become ‘bourgeois’. He describes the petit-bourgeois subject position in a number of ways. He writes that, because of relative lack of economic, cultural, or social capital, the petit-bourgeois must pay “in sacrifices, privations, renunciations, goodwill, recognition, in short, virtue” (333), in order to rise into the ranks of bourgeois society. In the “The Stones of the Village” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the main character is Victor Grabert. He characterizes the petit-bourgeois

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