Abstract
Following the strong program in cultural sociology, I propose a strong program in the sociology of liter-ature, which treats literary pieces rightly as relatively autonomous cultural entities and “independent var-iables”. To outline the epistemological foundations of the new research program, I compare how social knowledge comes into existence through the sociological text and the text of literary fiction. I discuss the representation of social reality in interpretive research, with Isaac Reed’s book Interpretation and Social Knowledge as a starting point. To claim literary autonomy, I outline some of the aspects which social the-ory shares with literary fiction. I am mainly interested in how social theory and literary fiction mediate social knowledge to their readers via the aesthetic experience. I identify two main categories of social knowledge mediated by literature: existential understanding and Zeitgeist. Discussing the sociological treatment of several novels, I look at how these two categories intertwine and support each other to create colorful, sensitive, but also robust and deep social knowledge, which condenses aesthetic, existential, and non-discursive aspects of social experience together with the “big picture” of whole societies. I argue that only by overcoming the often-assumed inferiority of literature in sociological research can sociology real-ize its full potential in understanding the meanings of social life.
Highlights
“Novels . . . tell us different things about social life from the things a piece of sociological research can tell us about social life, and to the extent that they tell us these different things, they tell us more things
Literary texts communicate social experience using a form of phenomenological reduction, which brackets out certain phenomena and emphasizes others
If sociologists of literature want to access these volatile features of social life mediated by the aesthetic experience of reading, they must profoundly scrutinize the epistemological foundations of currently dominating paradigms
Summary
“Novels . . . tell us different things about social life from the things a piece of sociological research can tell us about social life, and to the extent that they tell us these different things, they tell us more things. The “complex web of connected observations” (Ibid.: 242) is conveyed in such a way which, on the one hand, gives the readers an impression of situations well-known from their lives, while, on the other hand, transcends these particular situations and experiences into something more general with a quality of “the larger truth” (Ibid.: 247) To make his point that “novels can have, in addition to their qualities as literary works, qualities as social analyses”, Becker (Ibid.: 250) makes a few observations. We can distinguish such definitions into two main categories: first, literature is a way to grasp the emotional, subjective, and tacit aspects of social experience, which are prone to slip unnoticed by sociological analysis; second, literature is a way to access a deeper understanding of social phenomena, which is representative of the collective life in a broader socio-historical milieu The former channels the existential understanding of social experience, while the latter anchors this experience in more general cultural patterns of social life—i.e., what we usually understand by the term Zeitgeist. The social knowledge that Goffman acquired through Melville’s text was to a great extent based on the way Melville wrote. “[T]he ebullient voice of the narrator; the striking imagery of the ship; the embellished descriptions of character; the thematic structure”, says Alworth, deploy White-Jacket “toward the production of sociological knowledge” (Ibid.: 235). 11
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