Big Punning, Large Troping and Huge Riddling: Why and how Macbeth and other narrative texts are important and how to deal with them

Abstract

In William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth the narrative takes place at the interface between the auto/biographical and the social. The story is focused on the level of the state and polis, but also on a human level, and Macbeth's conflict with the idea of society as a static model is a social act. The usefulness of the literary for sociology is emphasised in Macbeth's narrative and its moves from minor to major. The sociological study of literature connects important proto-sociological insights to sociology more formally: narratives are everywhere, pervasive in sociology as a discipline as much as in literature, and more strongly society is based on the literary in the sense that narratives provide a route into collective and frequently political processes. It is not just that ‘the play's the thing’, as Shakespeare wrote, but more generally that the text - the text of any document - though a close analysis of its structure, organisation, tropes, characterisation, plot developments and so on, is important in opening up for analytical scrutiny a particular viewpoint on social mores. Tilly's emphasis is on material realities, but literary ideas and tools are highly relevant to accomplishing his aims for sociology. Looking from sociology to literature to society and back again is a huge comparison, fantastical but metaphorically real; and in the case of Macbeth, the textual means and moralities by which persons engage with the polis provides insights into such matters outside, as well as inside, the text.