The Double Life of Writers (original) (raw)

CHAPTER-I THE SOCIOLOGY OF LITERATURE: THEORETICAL PREMISES

The sociology of literature is a specialized area of study which focuses its attention upon the relation between a literary work and the social structure in which it is created. It reveals that the existence of a literary creation has the determined social situations. As there is a reciprocal relationship between a literary phenomena and social structure, sociological study of literature proves very useful to understand the socioeconomic situations, political issues, the world view and creativity of the writers, the system of the social and political organizations, the relations between certain thoughts and cultural configurations in which they occur and determinants of a literary work. The present chapter attempts to discuss the theoretical premises of the sociology of literature. It consists of the nature and scope of sociology and its relationship with literature, the historical development of the sociology literature, the nature of the sociology of literature, its theoretical approaches and methods and the areas and determinants of literature.

The Relationship between Literary Works and the World

One prominent philosopher, Peter Lamarque, has presented a view of the ontology of literary works1 which takes them to be robust entities consisting of a variety of parts including their history of production, and the various interpretations made of the text, as well as the "text-type" (2009). Gregory Currie (1991) suggests that "plot, character, narrative structure, style and genre" (338) are part of the work, and if we take 'work' to mean loosely the same thing as 'narrative' in Currie's (2010), then he holds them to be "intentional-communicative artefacts" (6). However, these views seem to me not to adequately account for and represent the role that literary works play in the metaphysics of our world as entities which are interpreted by people through a variety of means. Thus, I set forth a novel view of the position that literary works hold in the metaphysics of the world,2 which recognizes the importance of interpretation as a distinct, diverse, and complex activity done to literary works. I will argue that literary works stand in one-to-one relations with one or more entities in the world outside the work, and that the strength of these relations varies in accordance with how tightly the work and the entity are tied to one another.The most significant views of the ontology of literary works have either explicitly made interpretation part of the work, or have, at best, implied that it might be distinct from the work. These views seem not to adequately account for the role literary works play in our world as entities which are interpreted through a variety of means. Thus, I set forth a view of the metaphysical position that literary works hold in the world which recognizes the importance of interpretation. I argue that literary works stand in one-to-one relations with one or more entities in the world outside the work. I suggest that understanding literary works in this way allows us to recognize the importance of interpretation to our human interaction with literary works.

Structuralism as a Literary Theory: An Overview

AFRREV LALIGENS: An International Journal of Language, Literature and Gender Studies, 2012

The 20th century is characterized by the proliferation of ideas. The ideas so developed and harnessed permeated all fields of human endeavor from epistemology, metaphysics and logic. Every field has registered one form of breakthrough or another. In literature, many literary theories are developed and become the gateway to textual interpretation and analysis. One of such is the Theory of Structuralism. It is a plethora of theories with different analytical tools. Most of these subscribe to binary opposition as the ideal was of textual interpretation. Structuralism attempts a scientific way of arriving at the text unmindful of details. The theory announces the 'death of the author' while equally dismissing the reader as unimportant. This paper attempts an insight into the theory of structuralism with the aim of discussing it in simple terms.

Method in the Sociology of Literature

The British Journal of Sociology, 1983

were), these same "Piagetian" essays are also crucial for documenting an even more important fact: namely, that Goldmann succeeded implicitly in providing for his categories to be made into a systematic dialectical model. In other words, they can be brought together formally in a theoretically coherent fashion. In fact, his primary contribution lies here. As Goldmann 1ays, "We have also defined the positive human sciences and more exactly the Marxist method by means of a nearly identical term (which, moreover, we have borrowed from Jean Piaget), that of genetic structuralism. " 7 According to Goldmann, it is Piaget, "not at all ... influenced by Marx, who has empirically discovered in his research laboratory nearly all of the fundamental positions Marx had formulated a hundred years earlier in the domain of the social sciences. "8 Given this new emphasis on Goldmann's Piagetian context and the possibility of formally organizing his categories on this basis, then, it remains to point out Goldmann's use of certain categories borrowed from Lukacs and to order them into the model he intended. It is hoped that this approach will enable the reader to place the particular heuristic categories of single essays into a theoretical framework where they are related to other such categories. (Thus, while the essay "Subject and Object in the Human Sciences" introduces the reader to the delicate theoretical balance Goldmann achieved, the categories presented there are given a more rigorous order in the following essay, "The Epistemology of Sociology.") 9 The major advantage, but also the major difficulty, of the sociology of literature in general lies in its recognizing the need to 7. Marxisme et sciences humaines (Gallimard: Paris, 1970), p. 246. 8. Entretiens sur Les notions de genese et de structure (Mouton: The Hague, 1965), p. 15. The two major Goldmann essays that most explicitly express his debt to Piaget are "The Epistemology of Sociology" (in this volume) and ''Jean Piaget et la philosophie," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, 10 (1966), pp. 5•23. There are also two essays on Piaget in Goldmann's Recherches Dialectiques (Gallimard: Paris, 1959). 9. The next step would be to use the model in concrete research and then, in terms of current theoretical developments, to incorporate it into the complementary research of Jan Mukarovsky and Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij of the School of Tartu, all of whom attempt to elaborate a semiology of cultural creations using methods strikingly similar to Goldmann's genetic structuralism.

Essays on Method in the Sociology of Literature

1980

Literature and Reality (Introduction)

Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska, sectio FF – Philologiae

Literature and Reality (Introduction) Literatura i rzeczywistość (wprowadzenie) The volume you are holding in your hands is devoted to the broadly understood relations between a literary work, journalism and non-fictional reality-the real, tangible world. In his criticism of the hermetic model of poetry, characteristic of Western approaches, which entails creating an opposition between life (reality) and literature, Michał Paweł Markowski warned against separating language from reality, treating both these orders as disproportionate (2009, p. 33). This idea of straying away from creating opposition in order to search for appropriate formulas of description, 1 methods of research and deciphering activities is what guided the scholars, who prepared the papers compiled in this volume, trying to showcase the complex relations between literary (and-in a broader sense-also cultural) text and reality, as well as their analytical and interpretative consequences The papers collected in the themed issue of Annales UMCS. Sec. FF offer a variety of methodological perspectives, allowing us to take a look at the eponymous issue in cultural spaces-American, English, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Iranian, French, and Surinamese. This diversity and multitude of research directions-consistent with the academic profile of the journal-resulted in an interesting spectrum of issues addressed in the papers, whose temporal range covers

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