The Modality of the Textual Institutionalisation of Literary Studies: Towards a Sociology of Literature

Abstract

This paper aims to present a sociology of literary studies that is distinguished from the sociology of literature in that its focus is on literary studies as a social practice rather than as a socio-cultural institution: how literary studies is institutionalized as such not how it functions in relation to literature. The sociological analysis of literary studies in this paper entails two tasks. Firstly, it constructs a methodological frame within which literary studies can be observed and analysed in terms of the rules of discursive formation rather than as a pre-discursive entity. This is achieved through conceptualizing the Foucauldian notion of discursive formation and knowledge practice as an analytic strategy and operationalising it via Paul Dowling's Social Activity Method. Empirically, the analysis produces a description of the practice of literary studies as instantiated in the particular region of the practice constituted with what I refer to as the crisis discourse. The analysis describes literary studies as that which is emergent upon differing institutionalising strategies articulated by its participants to mark out literary studies from other practices and to maintain its disciplinarity through regulating the distribution and the access of the distribution of the discourse within and beyond the practice. The generalisability of the research in this paper lies in the applicability of the analytical method that can be employed at any given level of analysis to examine discursive practice—such as literary studies—as the effects of the particular discourses in terms of how they articulate and sustain the institutionalised identity of the practice.