Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

The sociology of literature, in the first of many paradoxes, elicits negations before assertions. It is not an established field or academic discipline. The concept as such lacks both intellectual and institutional clarity. Yet none of these limitations affects the vitality and rigor of the larger enterprise. We use the sociology of literature here to refer to the cluster of intellectual ventures that originate in one overriding conviction: the conviction that literature and society necessarily explain each other. Scholars and critics of all kinds congregate under this outsize umbrella only to differ greatly in their sense of what they do and what sociology of literature does. They subscribe to a wide range of theories and methods. Many would not accept the sociology of literature as an appropriate label for their own work; other would refuse it to their colleagues. Nevertheless, every advocate agrees that a sociological practice is essential to literature. For the sociology of literature does not constitute just one more approach to literature. Because it insists upon a sociology of literary knowledge and literary practice within the study of literature, the sociology of literature raises questions basic to all intellectual inquiry.

The sociology of literature begins in diversity. The way that is combines the ancient traditions of art with the modern practices of social science makes the very term something of an oxymoron. There is not one sociology of literature, there are many sociological practices of literature, each of which operates within a particular intellectual tradition and specific institutional context. These practices cross basic divisions within the contemporary intellectual field, especially within the university. Inherently interdisciplinary, the sociology of literature is subject to constant reformulation as scholars re-evaluate their disciplines. In consequence, disciplinary boundaries seem less rigid, less logical, and, hence, less authoritative than ever before. Even so—and this is another paradox of the sociology of literature—any sociological conception of literature is best situated in terms of an original discipline and its institutional setting. However frequently individual scholars cross over disciplinary lines, the fundamental divisions retain their force.

Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson is professor of French at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she is author of Literary France: The Making of a Culture. Philippe Desan, whose Naissance de la method: Machiavelle, la Ramée, Bodin, Montaigne, Descartes was published in 1987, is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Wendy Griswold, associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, recently published Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576-1980.

To talk about the sociology of literary representation is, first and foremost, to propose to historicize representational activity at that crucial point where its social and linguistic dimensions intersect.1 The troublesome incongruity between these two dimensions need not be minimized, but it can be grappled with as soon as the presuppositions of either the hegemony of the subject or that of language itself are questioned. In this view, the position of George Lukács (not to mention that of Erich Auerbach or even that of the more traditional sociologist of literary referentiality) tends to ignore the state of extreme vulnerability and recurrent jeopardy in which representation has always found itself, just as Michel Foucault’s diametrically opposed view of the ultimate hegemony of discourse obliterates or displaces a lot of unbroken contemporary representational practice. Even more important, both these quite different approaches may be said to appear monistic in that the gaps and links between what is representing what is represented are viewed either in terms of closure and continuity or in terms of rupture and discontinuity. But as I shall proceed to glance at some representational strategies in the late modern period, the question needs to be faced whether it is not precisely in these gaps and links, and in the way in which, simultaneously, the gaps are closed and the links are broken up, that historical activity can be seen to assert itself.

If the contradiction of system and event, of predetermination and performance can be seen to affect representational activity, and if this contradiction can at all be formulated in terms of a sociological Erkenntnisinteresse, issue of historicity must be discussed on more than one level: not only on the level of what is represented (which would reduce this project to some genealogy of the signified) but also on the level of rupture between them as well as their interdependence) together and to attempt to interconnect the semiotic problematic of signification and the extratextual dimension of representativeness, as involving changeful relations of writing, reading, social reproduction, and political power. In this view, the use of signs, although never quite reducible to a referential function, must be reconsidered and this question needs to be asked: under which conditions and in which respects would it be possible to talk of sociology in that area of instability itself which marks the relations between signifier and signified, between the author’s language and the reader’s meaning?

See also: Cheryl Walker, Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author

Robert Weimann is professor of English and American literature at the Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte, Akademie der Künste, Berlin DDR. His books in English include Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in Theater and Structure and Society in Literary History. His most recent book-length study in German is Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis: Repräsentation und Autorität im Elisabethanischen Theater.

The starting point for my reading of the exchanges between Marx and Balzac is the repetition in The Eighteenth Brumaire of a striking image employed in Colonel Chabert to represent the force of ideology as experienced by a man forcibly set outside the conventions it endorses. Balzac first: “The social and judicial world weighted on his breast like a nightmare.”3 Marx’s appropriation occurs in a much-quoted meditation on the past as impediment to the future.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.4

What is the (material) weight of an (immaterial) nightmare, and why do Balzac and Marx agree that invoking it is a valid means to express humanity’s relation to its history?5

4. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1963), p. 15; my emphasis. Further references to this work, abbreviated EB, will be included in the text.

5. In French and German: “Le monde social et judiciare lui pesait sur la poitrine comme un cauchemar”; “Die Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem Gehirne der Lebenden.” This strikes me as so obvious a borrowing that I have to wonder why it does not seem to be generally known. On contributing factor may be that the standard French translation of The Eighteenth Burmaire gives a fanciful version of the sentence in Marx: “La tradition de toutes les generations mortes pèse d’un poids très lourd sur le cerveau des vivants” (Marx, Le 18 brumaire de Louis Bonaparte [Paris, 1969], p. 15). Does this poids très lourd come from a misreading of ein Alp as eine Alp?

See also: Bill Brown, The Tyranny of Things (Trivia in Karl Marx and Mark Twain)

Sandry Petrey is professor of French and comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The author of History in the Text: Quatrevingt-Treize and the French Revolution, he is completing a book entitled Realism and Revolution.

There are two main ways in which an interest in the sociology of literature can be justified. The first form of justification is (in the epistemological sense of the term) realist: literature is in fact deeply conditioned by its social context, and any critical account of it which omits this fact is therefore automatically deficient. The second way is pragmatist: literature is in fact shaped by all kinds of factors and readable in all sorts of contexts, but highlighting its social determinants is useful and desirable from a particular political standpoint.

Both of these cases would seem to have something going for them. Hardly anybody would want to deny that literature is in an important sense a social product; but this claim is so general that a specifically “sociological” treatment of literary works does not necessarily follow from it. Metaphors and line endings, after all, are also in some sense social products, so that to attend to these elements of a literary text is not necessarily to deny the work’s sociality. “Social product” would seem too comfortably broad a category, just as “economic product” would seem too crippingly narrow. A problem with the realist case about the sociology of literature, then, is that it is not very clear what exactly is being claimed. The pragmatist case would seem a persuasive rationale for, say, a feminist reading of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, since few people would want to claim that the poem was in some central way about patriarchal relations in the sense that The Rape of the Lock is. A Marxist critic who attended to questions of social class in Treasure Island, perhaps placing Long John Silver in the context of the British shop stewards’ movement and celebrating his antagonism to the gentry, would not necessarily be committed to holding that these issues were “in fact” crucial to the text; he or she would insist instead that they should be brought to light because they were crucial to history and society in general.

See also: Leo Lowenthal and Ted R. Weeks, Sociology of Literature in Retrospect

Terry Eagleton’s recent works include collected essays—Against the Grain and William Shakespeare—as well as a novel, Saints and Scholars. His work in progress is on the ideology of the aesthetic.

The method chosen here draws on concepts borrowed from sociology and anthropology. This double conceptual approach is necessary for a society divided between values inherited from medieval Christianity and precapitalist practices. Seventeenth-century France did not think of itself as a class society but as a society of orders. Since sociology is a system of knowledge whose concepts are taken from an imaginary construct, it is thus more suited to analyzing bourgeois society than societies in transition.6 In trying to measure the past with the aid of tools forged in and for contemporary societies, the sociologist runs the risk of only measuring an artifact, produced by his theories in the field of history. Hence the need for the anthropological concepts, including the notion of exchange, among others, whether material (the exchange of goods), symbolic (the exchange of signs), or sexual (the exchange of women).

This approach will bring to light the contradictions underlying the society of the ancient régime. Whereas an ordinary sociohistorical approach views the reign of Louis XIV as unified under a dogmatic classicism, the socioanthropological approach stresses the tensions and oppositions running through this society. Classicism appears then as a façade covering up the change that it cannot imagine. This “spectacle”7 makes it possible to unite contradictory social practices, both those produced by consumption and which originate in the medieval economy (based on the gift/countergift and service) and those belonging to the early accumulation of capital which sketch future bourgeois economic practices.

6. See Cornelius Catoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).

7. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, rev. English ed. (Detroit, 1977).

See also: Jean-Marie Apostolidès, On Paul de Man's War

Jean-Marie Apostolidès is professor of French literature at Stanford University. His publications include Le roi-machine, Les metamorphoses de Tintin, and Le prince sacrifié. Alice Musick McLean, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, is specializing in medieval narrative and the literature of the fantastic.

The novel represents a formal attempt to come to terms with innovation and originality and to accept the limitations of tradition; it reflects the larger cultural embracing of the present moment as a legitimate subject not only for passing conversation but for serious discourse. For at least a half century before the novel emerged, the world of print had experimented in assuming, absorbing, and exploiting that new cultural consciousness based on human curiosity—on the one hand “preparing” readers for novels and on the other offering later writers of novels some sense of potential subject matter and potential form, a sense of how the present could be won over to serious literature. The process was a curious and unstructured one; in its early manifestations it hardly seemed destined to lead to a significant new literary form. Even in retrospect, the print novelties of the turn of the century hardly seem part of a teleology of form or thought, but the broad ferment that authenticated the new, together with the apparent permanence that print seemed to bestow on accounts of the temporary and passing, ultimately led to a mind and art that transcended occasions and individuals even though it engaged them first of all—energetically, enthusiastically, evangelically. The first fruits of the modern moment-centered consciousness were not very promising, but the emergence of that consciousness enabled, when other cultural contexts were right, an altogether new aesthetic and a wholly different relation between life and literature.

See also: Charles Altieri, What Is Living and What Is Dead in American Postmodernism: Establishing the Contemporaneity of Some American Poetry

J. Paul Hunter, professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim, Occasional Form, and of a forthcoming book on literacy, readership, and the contexts of early English fiction, Before Novels.

If one accepts the social hierarchy that this taste structure masks, it is easy to accept the validity of the particular criteria which serve as the working test of excellence. In fact, the high value placed on rationality, complexity, irony, reflexivity, linguistic innovation, and the “disinterested” contemplation of the well-wrought artifact makes sense within cultural institutions devoted to the improvement of the individuality, autonomy, and productive competence of the already privileged individuals who come to them for instruction and advice.8 Appreciation for the technical fine points of aesthetic achievement is also understandable among people whose daily work centers on the business of discrimination. But it is worth keeping in mind that the critical dismissal of literary works and institutions that do not embody these values as failures is an exercise of power which rules out the possibility of recognizing that such works and institutions might be valuable to others because they perform functions more in keeping with their own somewhat different social position, its material constraints, and ideological concerns. The essay critical dismissal of the Club and other “popularizers” is an act of exclusion that banishes those who might mount even the most minimal of challenges to the culture and role of the contemporary intellectual by proclaiming their own right to create, use, and value books for different purposes.

My preoccupation with the Book-of-the-Month Club arises, then, out of a prior interest in the way books are variously written, produced, marketed, read, and evaluated in contemporary American culture. My subjects might best be described as ways of writing rather than Literature, ways of reading rather than texts.9 I have begun to examine the Club’s editorial operation with the intention of eventually comparing the manner, purpose, and substance of the editors’ choice of books with the choices of actual Book-of-the-Month Club members. Such a comparison seems potentially interesting for a variety of reasons.

8. For a discussion of the connections between the social position and role of literary academics and the values they promote through the process of canonization, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York, 1985), esp. pp. 186-201.

9. See, for instance, my earlier effort to specify how a group of women actually read and evaluate individual books in the much-maligned romance genre, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984). I am indebted to Mary Pratt’s discussion (“Towards a Critical Cultural Practice,” paper presented at the Conference on the Agenda of Literary Studies, Marquette University, 8-9 Oct. 1982) of the concept of “literariness” and the way it disciplines ideologically this particular way of describing my own interests.

See also: Janice Radway, Research Universities, Periodical Publication, and the Circulation of Professional Expertise: On the Significance of Middlebrow Authority

Janice Radway is an associate professor of American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984) and is a former editor of American Quarterly. This article is part of a larger study, the working title of which is “The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader: The Transformation of Literary Production in the Twentieth Century.”

The break necessary to establish a rigorous science of cultural works is something more and something else than a simple methodological reversal.1 It implies a true conversion of the ordinary way of thinking and living the intellectual enterprise. It is a matter of breaking the narcissistic relationship inscribed in the representation of intellectual work as a “creation” and which excludes as the expression par excellence of “reductionist sociology” the effort to subject the artist and the work of art to a way of thinking that is doubly objectionable since it is both genetic and generic.

It would be easy to show what the most different kinds of analysis of the work of art owe to the norms that require treating works in and for themselves, with no reference to the social conditions of their production. Thus in the now-classic Theory of Literature, René Wellek and Austin Warren seem to advocate “an explanation in terms of the personality and the life of the writer.” In fact, because they (no doubt along with most of their readers) accept the ideology of the “man of genius” they are committed, in their own terms, to “one of the oldest and best-established methods of literary study”—which seeks the explanatory principle of a work in the author taken in isolation (the uniqueness of a work being considered a characteristic of the “creator”).2 In fact, this explanatory principle resides in the relationship between the “space” of works in which each particular work is taken and the “space” of authors in which each cultural enterprise is constituted. Similarly, when Sartre takes on the project of specifying the meditations through which society determined Flaubert, the individual, he attributes to those factors that can be perceived from that point of view—that is, to social class as refracted through a family structure—what are instead the effects of generic factors influencing every writer in an artistic field that is itself in a subordinate position in the field of power and also the effects specific to all writers who occupy the same position as Flaubert within the artistic field.

1. See Pierre Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” trans. Sian France, Social Science Information 8 (Apr. 1969): 89-119; originally published as “Champ intellectual et projet créateur,” Les Temps moderns no. 246 (Nov. 1966): 865-906. See also Bourdieu, “Champ du pouvoir, champ intellectual et habitus de classe,” Scolies 1 (1971): 7-26, and Bourdieu, “The Genesis of the Concepts of Habitus and Field,” trans. Channa Newman, Sociocriticism no. 2 (Dec. 1985): 11-24.

2. René Welleck and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1956) p. 69.

See also: Leslie Hill, Flaubert and the Rhetoric of Stupidity

Pierre Bourdieu holds the chair of sociology at the Collège de France and is director of the Centre de Sociologie européenne at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Among his most recent works are Distinction (1984), Homo Academicus (1984), and Choses Dites (1987).

In recent years the sociology of literature has developed on the basis of another formula: literature is part of the larger social order. It is not the “expression of society” but an integral part of it. The idea is simple, the implications are great. Literature as part of the social order goes beyond a study of the external social manifestations of literature, beyond the sociology of the book, author, and reader practiced, for example, by Robert Escarpit—a sociology which leads inevitably to a positivist outlook.5 Nor can we be satisfied with a wholesale borrowing of sociological concepts that does no more than provide the tools for arguments in favor of one or another theory of literature.6 Whatever the interest of these theories (and sometimes it is very great), a sociology of literature becomes possible only when it includes the sociology of the theories elaborated on the subject itself. (So far my purpose has led me gradually to substitute the term “sociology of literature” for “literature and society.” Philosophical or political theories can be propounded on the relations between literature and society, but these relations can be studied scientifically only in sociological terms.)

5. See Robert Escarpit, Sociologie de la literature (Paris, 1958). See also Escarpit et al., Le Littéraire et le social: Éléments pour une sociologie de la literature (Paris, 1970).

6. Pierre V. Zima’s presentations of the sociology of literature seem to be taking him toward this failing. See Zima, Pour une sociologie du texte littéraire (Paris, 1978).

See also: Mary Poovey, The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism

Alain Viala is a professor of the Université de Paris II—Sorbonne Nouvelle. Author of Naissance de l’écrivain: Sociologie de la literature à l’âge classique (1985) and Les Institutions de la vie littéraire en France au XVIIe siècle (1985), he is currently working on studies of the sociology of literature, Racine, and literary strategies. Paula Wissing is a free-lance translator and editor.

For most literary sociologists serious modern work starts with Robert Escarpit’s Sociologie de la Littérature (1958), a book which proposes that sociology (or a sociological perspective) can usefully explain how literature operates as a social institution. Subsequent Escarpit-inspired work on the literary enterprise covers topics such as the profession of authorship; the stratified “circuits” (Escarpit’s hallmark concept) of production, distribution, and consumption; and the commodity aspect of literature. Critics have objected that Escarpit’s increasingly macroquantitative and statistics-bound procedures bleach out literary and ideological texture. And his model of literature as discrete social system encourages the abstract model making which Raymond Williams despises.1 But, whatever its shortomcings, Escarpit’s definition of literary product and practice as social faits (not facts, but things made) forms an essential starting point for the sociologist intending to investigate the apparatuses of literature.

In what follows, I shall mainly fix on a problem currently disabling constructive research on the literary-sociological lines projected by Escarpit: namely, scholarly ignorance about book trade and publishing history technicalities. This sets up, I shall suggest, a large and troubling hole at the centre of the subject, and there is little indication, at this stage, how or when the hole is to be filled.

1. See Raymond Williams, “Literature and Sociology,” Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London, 1980), pp. 11-30.

See also: Cesare Segre, Narrative Structures and Literary History

John Sutherland is professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. His books include Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978), Bestsellers (1980), and Offensive Literature (1982). He is currently completing an encyclopedia of Victorian fiction.

Unable to respond to the questions, to all the questions, I will ask myself instead whether responding is possible and what that would mean in such a situation. And I will risk in turn several questions prior to the definition of a responsibility. But is it not an act to assume in theory the concept of a responsibility? Is that not already to take a responsibility? One’s own as well as the responsibility to which one believes one ought to summon others?

The title names a war. Which war?

Do not think only of the war that broke out several months ago around some articles signed by a certain Paul de Man, in Belgium between 1940 and 1942. Later you will understand why it is important to situate the beginning of things public, that is the publications, early in 1940 at the latest, during the war but before the occupation of Belgium by the Nazis, and not in December 1940, the date of the first article that appeared in Le Soir, the major Brussels newspaper that was then controlled, more or less strictly, by the occupiers. For several months, in the United States, the phenomena of this war “around” Pula de Man have been limited to newspaper articles. War, a public act, is by rights something declared. So we will not count in the category of war the private phenomena—meetings, discussions, correspondences, or telephonic conclaves—however intense they may have been in recent days, and already well beyond the American academic milieu.

See also: Cheryl Walker, Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author

Jacques Derrida is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and also teaches at the University of California, Irvine. A teacher at Yale for ten years, he is the author of Mémoires: for Paul de Man (1986).

Peggy Kamuf is associate professor of French at Miami University. She is the author of Fictions of Feminism Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (1982) and Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (forthcoming). Her article “Pieces of Resistance” is forthcoming in Reading de Man Reading.