Abstract
Following the strong program in cultural sociology, I propose a literary turn to recognize literary texts “as relatively autonomous cultural entities” with their own agency. This chapter is part of a larger project connecting cultural sociology with the sociology of literature and literary theory to develop a strong program in the sociology of literature. Instead of approaching literary fiction as an object of analysis, sociology and literature can contribute to social knowledge in a symmetrical way, where fiction is not devalued vis-à-vis social scientific inquiry. Just the opposite: recognizing the specificities of literary communication, we can access textures of social life that are only barely graspable by sociology. A crucial step is to examine how social knowledge comes into existence when reading a fictional text. Embracing the structural aesthetics of Jan Mukařovský, I modify the concept of iconicity to capture the iconic experience of reading through which literature mediates social experience that is iconic of broader social phenomena. Building on social aesthetics, I discuss implications of my model for social theory, textual representation, and sociological explanation in general.
Modified version of article “Knowing through feeling: the aesthetic structure of a novel and the iconic experience of reading.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 9.2 (2021): 211–241. Sections of the original article reprinted with permission from Springer Nature.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Perhaps ironically, Latour brought the idea of “non-human actors” as a basis for the Actor-Network Theory from literary science. Now is the time for this concept to return to where it once originated.
- 3.
Founded in 1926, the Prague Linguistic Circle was an association of linguists theoretically based on, and critically reflecting upon, Saussurean structuralism and Russian formalism.
- 4.
The terms “social” and “sociological” theory are often used interchangeably. Here, I consider “sociological” theory as a subset of “social” theory, supposing that social theory relates to the social sciences in general. My position is different from Sanderson’s (2005, p. 2f) suggestion that “sociological” theory is more concerned with understanding society while “social” theory with “criticizing and rebuilding.”
- 5.
- 6.
For Alexander (2015, p. 5), the claim that “surface and depth combine arbitrarily” is of high political and ideological importance. “The conflation of surface and depth is … dangerous” because iconicity “makes meaning seem natural” (Alexander 2015, p. 5), which makes ideological space for conservative and essentialist thinking.
- 7.
To be precise, Jakobson also introduced the so-called artifice, which stands for “imputed similarity” (Waugh 1980, p. 71): non-arbitrary connections between parallelisms, repetitions, and equivalencies, which are made “artificially”—typically in poetry.
- 8.
We say “horrible Harry”—and “not dreadful, terrible, frightful, disgusting”—because of the poetic device of paronomasia, that is, a grouping of words that sound similar but have different meanings (Jakobson 1960, p. 357).
- 9.
A well-known linguistic example comes from the 1951 political campaign of Dwight Eisenhower, playing a pun on his nickname. The success of using this linguistic principle was repeated in a 1992 popular commercial “Be Like Mike” featuring American basketball player Michael Jordan.
- 10.
Binder (2018, p. 404) understands Peirceian “interpretants” as the “act of articulation” that stands for an “idea produced in the mind” by the Saussurean signifier.
- 11.
Literary texts achieve an independent “career outside its original context of production” (Santana-Acuña 2014, p. 98). Tracing the text’s career adds an important diachronic aspect to the interpretation.
- 12.
I am thankful for this idea to Eduardo de la Fuente.
- 13.
I owe a great deal of gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for their suggestion to discuss social aesthetics, which I find immensely fruitful in comparison to my approach and to Reed’s (2011, p. 10) notion of “interpretive epistemic mode.”
- 14.
Literary criteria, through which particular texts reach their verisimilitude, can be expressed by the dynamic “aesthetic norm” (Mukařovský 1970 [1936]). Unlike the scientific criteria, the aesthetic norm is rather implicitly defined by the whole aggregate of relations between literary texts, reviews, critical essays, and literary actors such as authors, agents, publishers, translators, and readers.
- 15.
See also Felski’s (2008, p. 85) conception of literary mimesis as a “re-description,” “a chain of interpretive processes rather than … an imitation.”
- 16.
The phenomenological validity simply means that the investigator does not strive to contradict or overcome people’s experiences but rather makes the explanation coherent with them. As Martin (2011, p. 336) puts it, “the actors [should be able to], with dialogue, understand the referent of every term in our explanation.”
- 17.
Referring to iconicity, Ricoeur (1976, p. 40) shows that the artistic practice does not seek to merely reduplicate the reality as its “less real” copy. Just the opposite: through the aesthetic expression, the segment of reality is transformed into a message (a painting, a novel, a sculpture) that exceeds this particular segment. The iconic augmentation allows for communicating more by presenting less.
- 18.
The explanation should stem from the concrete first-person perspectives so that our systematized sense of the whole (the explanation) is coherent with those perspectives. The general is explained through the particular, not vice versa.
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Váňa, J. (2022). The Sociological Truth of Fiction: The Aesthetic Structure of a Novel and the Iconic Experience of Reading. In: Thumala Olave, M.A. (eds) The Cultural Sociology of Reading. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_5
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