La sociologie de la littérature par Gisèle Sapiro

Abstract

of a reader’s complicity in a perpetrator narrative.Yet Sanyal is also willing to recognize where literary figuration falls short: while Boualem Sansal’s Le village de l’Allemand productively uses irony to underscore the French Republic’s problematic uses of Holocaust memory (à la Sarkozy), the novel’s unwillingness to interrogate France’s colonial legacy undermines its engagement with comparative histories.While offering fresh insight on a number of canonical texts, Memory and Complicity is timely, provocative , and relevant well beyond the French example: the plasticity of Sanyal’s framework, like the rhetorical figures she assesses, suggests the possibility of new crosspollinations across a range of linguistic and historical contexts. Trinity College (CT) Sara Kippur Sapiro, Gisèle. La sociologie de la littérature. Paris: Découverte, 2014. ISBN 978-27071 -6574-9. Pp. 125. 10 a. As Sapiro explains in her detailed and judiciously conceived survey, the field of studies and research known as the sociology of literature was constituted in the second half of the twentieth century. This new approach to literature originated at a time when literary theory, under the influence of new criticism and structuralism, was increasingly focused on the internal analysis of literary works. In contrast, a sociological perspective developed in the context of Marxist theory and of work done in the field of cultural studies. The fundamental assumption governing a sociological approach is that the meaning of a literary work vastly overflows the boundaries of an authorial intention—not only taking on a significance provided by the context in which the work is created—but also having the potential of acquiring inflections and emphases according to subsequent configurations of social or cultural developments. In this sense, literature appears as“une institution, un champ, un monde ou un réseau de relations, elle est médiatisée par l’univers social dont elle est le produit” (34). Accordingly, Sapiro proceeds to outline three particular levels on which these processes of mediation take place, namely, the conditions surrounding the production of works of literature, the sociology of these works, and the sociology of their reception. Thus the production of literary works is subject to external factors such as economic, political, and religious pressures as well as to internalized ethical and aesthetic conventions or convictions. The theory of Pierre Bourdieu, as it locates the production of literay works at the intersection of a habitus and a champ or field, has been particularly useful in this regard. Such an approach helps avoid what Bourdieu has termed “l’illusion biographique” informing traditional studies that typically conflate an author’s life and work. The author’s role is to be understood instead in terms of “un travail de mise en forme,” a process defined as a “transubstantiation de la matière vécue, imaginée ou empruntée à des sources extérieures et leur amalgame, dont le 268 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 269 principe échappe le plus souvent à l’auteur lui-même” (65). This endeavor inevitably bears the mark of an author’s point of view and, according to Bourdieu, encompasses the entire history of the field of literature (67). As for the reception of literary works, a sociological approach seeks to go beyond a quantitative approach by providing an appreciation of the various modes of appropriation and interpretation to which works are subjected over time. Needless to say, a “sociologie de la lecture” proves eminently daunting in its realization. Moreover, it is a task whose complexity has only grown as a result of the international circulation of literature and literary theory. New fields, such as the sociology of translation and the sociology of transnational modes of appropriation are emerging. In concluding her concise, dense, and most valuable survey Sapiro notes that“si de nombreuses pistes de recherche ont été ouvertes, il reste beaucoup à faire” (108), thus stating what has become both obvious and challenging in the area of her investigations. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis Spandri, Francesco, éd. La littérature au prisme de l’économie: argent et roman en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2981-1. Pp. 400. 49 a. This important collection, comprised of an introduction and...