The Work of Making and the Work it Does: Cultural Sociology and ‘Bringing- Into-Being’ the Cultural Assemblage of the Olive Schreiner Letters

Abstract

Programmatic ideas regarding cultural sociology and its inter-relationship with cultural production inspired by the work of Inglis et al., Mukerji and Bennett are explored. A particular cultural assemblage, the editorial practices arising in an interdisciplinary project concerned with researching and publishing the letters of South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner, is detailed. Four key aspects of the particular ‘bringing-into-being’ which these working practices involve are interrogated, regarding the ‘moment of writing’, archive stories, the ‘editorial moment’ and the involvement of the later reader, with these examined in depth in relation to examples of Schreiner’s letters.