부르디외에 따르면, 문학은 추상적 담론이 아닌, 고유의 언어적 자산 혹은 문학성이라는 상징자본을 통해 사회적 헤게모니를 구축해야 하는 사회의 실체적 장이다. 다시 말해 문학은, 그러니까 문학장은 사회의 하위장이다. 따라서 문학권력 역시도 결국 사회로부터 생성되며, 특히 사회가 전환기에 있을 때 문학장의 권력지형도는 매우 역동적으로 이동 변화할 수밖에 없다. 이 같은 관점에서, 본 연구는 68혁명이라는 사회 전환기적 사건에 따른 문학장의 다변화, 즉 그 단절과 생성 그리고 재생산의 변화 양상들에 대한 고찰을 통해, 문학장의 형성과 이동 그리고 그 권력화의 메커니즘을 밝히고자 하였다. 이를 위해 기본적으로 프랑스 68혁명의 발생과 전개, 그리고 그 근본 패러다임을 이해하고, 연계적으로 68혁명 이후 프랑스 문학장의 구조적 기반이자 재생산의 원동력이었던 원리적 사상[후기구조주의], 실천적 주체[68의 지성], 전략적 이슈[페미니즘] 그리고 제도적 출판[Tel Quel]을 실증적인 동시에 이론적으로 고찰하면서, 68혁명 이후 프랑스 문학장의 원리, 실천, 전략, 제도, 재생산의 메커니즘은 물론, 문학성의 문제, 나아가 문학성과 문학권력 간의 유기적 관계에 이르는 다각적인 논의를 지향하였다.
According to Bourdieu, literature is not abstract discourse, but a substantial and structural field of society that is required to construct social hegemony through unique linguistic assets or the symbolic capital of literariness. And so, the literary field is a subfield of society and literary authority also comes from the society. Therefore, when a society is undergoing a turning point or a sudden change, the authority map of literary field is indeed subject to dynamic changes. In this context, the literary field theory of Bourdieu, especially its concepts of principal, practice, strategy, institution and reproduction serve as constituent clues to our study whose purpose is to examine changes in French literature since May '68. In this study we tried to identify the formation and shift of the literary field and the mechanism of its empowerment by inquiring into the changes in the literary field, resulting from the social-transitional events of May '68, changes, that is, literary rupture, genesis and reproduction. The study begins with understanding the occurrence and development of the May '68 in France and the fundamental paradigms intrinsic in the revolution. May '68 in France was a cultural revolution, the issues of which were associated with racial and ethnic discrimination, sexual liberation, antiwar and antinuclear movements, environmental and ecological movements, and feminist movements. In terms of the literary field, these paradigms lead to the activation of feminist literature minority literature. The study is in practice the discussion about the structure and reproduction of the French literary field since May '68, in which we address the principal thought (post-structuralism), the practical subject (an intellectual of May '68, Roland Barthes), a strategic issue (feminism) and an institutional publishing (Tel Quel), which were the structural bases and basic reproduction factors of literary field at that time, and after all, we understand the organic mechanism between literariness and literary empowerment. It was an inevitable result that the '68 thought, resistance to all forms of authority, was linked with post-structuralism of resistant nature against the authoritative structuralism. Post-structuralism tried to resolve the dilemma of structuralism: separation from the public. Represented by resistance, liberation, and autonomy, the spirit of May '68 was closely connected with post-structuralism characterized by the ‘deconstruction' of structure and the emergence of the ‘subject', and post-structuralism internally brought about the lack or weakening of literariness, while deconstructing the literary forms and producing creative readers as the subject-writing, but in the external way, it discussed the problems ‘about' literature, or the ‘literary' problems, from a principal point of view and as a result strengthened the literary field. Roland Barthes, who led also the ideological flow of post-structuralism, was a leading intellectual and leading critic in the French literary field after the May '68 events, who contributed to strengthening the literary field by systematizing literature in a logical manner through the discourses across the literary topics including language and author, text and writing. The discourse of feminist literature, a new paradigm of literature since May '68, has sublimated to the level of humanism the problems about women with minorities and homosexuals while addressing human problems suppressed in a frame of structure. The discourse of feminist literature still helps enrich the contemporary literary field of France through the aesthetics of productive separation. Since 1968, the French literary field has been developed in connection with a huge system of thought, and the publishing media also has been in the same system. The publishing media, an incubator of criticism, formed a system with direct connection with the empowerment of literature, and in particular, Tel Quel provided institutional support to the literary field through almost all contemporary discourses. In summary, May '68 structuralized the mechanism of positive circulation for literary reproduction through the sublimation of thought and the institutionalization. The changes in the French literary field resulting from May '68, a model case suggesting that a social structure can be a mechanism of intensifying the literary field, present a clue with which we can get over the dilemma of contemporary literature.