English Studies and my own reception of Bourdieu and St Clair

I have in the past committed myself to a strongly 'discursive' (even linguistic) approach to reception study (see virtually all of my papers that have seen print to date). Despite that, it now seems clear to me that it is in extra-discursive conditions of the sort discussed in my last couple of posts that a great part of the explanation of reception (and indeed production) must be located. Circulation for one thing, but also circulation of the resources necessary for understanding. And this makes me wonder about my own reception of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of Gallic taste and William St Clair's economic history of British reading.

It is obvious to me now that these works have more to contribute to an understanding of reception than almost anything else that has yet been published. And yet when I encountered them as a PhD student, I missed so much of their significance. Is that because I encountered them within the context of English Studies? I'm thinking back on the use of schooled interpretive resources in appreciating Joss Whedon (blogged here), or the different interpretive resources various groups of professionals seem to have brought to bear on The Wire (blogged here).

Whether carried out from the point of view of language or of literature, English Studies as it currently manifests itself neither demands from its practitioners nor provides to its students the resources needed to investigate the production, circulation, and reception of texts - never mind an appreciation of its own disciplinary role in those processes - and thus perpetuates the mystification of its own objects of study.

So hard to know which box to think outside of, when encased in so many. I looked beyond 'the text', but not beyond linguistic codes (McGann 1991).