James F. English reviews The Sociology of Literature

Gisèle Sapiro. The Sociology of Literature. Trans. Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2023. 212 pp.

Review by James F. English

11 July 2024

In the preface to this revised and translated edition of her excellent primer, Gisèle Sapiro expresses surprise that “in the United States, where consciousness of the power of cultural forms has been sharpened by feminist, queer, and antiracist movements, the sociology of literature remains so marginal.” Compared to other countries and especially to France, she observes, the US stands out for the “lack of interest in literature among [its] sociologists and in sociology among [its] literary scholars” (p. xiv). This circumstance perhaps explains why it took a decade for the American edition of such a useful and authoritative book to arrive. Originally published in 2014, La sociologie de la littérature appeared in Spanish just two years later, soon followed by a half dozen other translations including Japanese, Bulgarian, and Portuguese. By 2020 it had become the standard university teaching text in many countries of Europe and South America. If US publishers held back, it was likely out of concern that there wasn’t a sufficiently robust curriculum in the sociology of literature to justify publishing the volume here.

Marginal though it is in the US, however, the field has lately been nudging centerward with the rise of a generational cohort that includes Clayton Childress, Alexander Manshel, Laura McGrath, J. D. Porter, Dan Sinykin, Richard Jean So, and a number of others. Supplementing new work by scholars established a bit earlier such as Mark McGurl, Ted Underwood, and Juliana Spahr, the books and articles emerging from this group have made it possible to construct exciting syllabi in contemporary American approaches to the sociology of literature. The one obstacle has been the lack of a good basic introduction to the field’s history, theory, and practice.

Sapiro’s book definitively fills that gap. Written for La Découverte’s Repères series of introductory handbooks, The Sociology of Literature is brief at one hundred fifty pages and provides a brisk, orderly overview of the main lines of approach that have structured intercourse between the two disciplines. While Sapiro pays particular attention to the relational model of the literary field developed by her doctoral advisor, Pierre Bourdieu, but her survey is nonpartisan. She notes the epistemological conflicts between field theory and other sociological models that conceive of literature as an institution, a system, a world, a game, or a network, but her emphasis is on their points of methodological compatibility, or at least productive complementarity. In similar fashion, while she devotes a chapter to each of the three broad areas of specialization among sociologists of literature—production (authorship, patronage, and the publishing industry), reception (readerships, critics and fans, consecrations and canons), and the work itself (modes of social representation and of literary formalization)—her aim is not to reinforce these divisions but to suggest their many overlaps and matters of shared concern.

For the sake of this edition, Sapiro has expanded her 2014 text, broadening the survey to cover recent developments, especially in the US. This is doubly helpful. It clarifies the connections between North American scholars, who are mostly based in literary studies, and their theoretical and methodological partners in French sociology, from Robert Escarpit and Pierre Bourdieu to Luc Boltanski, Bruno Latour, Pascale Casanova, and Sapiro herself. But it also highlights important differences of strategy and aim in the different national contexts. An example is the approach to questions of diversity. Among French scholars, the term is most often invoked in connection with linguistic diversity and the sociology of literary translation, which studies material and symbolic barriers of entry facing authors working in minor languages. In recent American sociology of literature, diversity is understood as above all a matter of race, and scholars focus their attention on the barriers of entry facing authors of color. Sapiro’s lucid and even-handed overview suggests how divergent streams of research such as these might be profitably drawn together, yielding a fuller picture of the way literature functions as a system of social exclusion. By publishing her book in English, Stanford University Press has opened new opportunities for just that kind of mutual, transatlantic engagement.