Cultural Sociology and Literature

Summary

Cultural sociology and literature have been a burgeoning area since the mid-1990s and have built on a long tradition of the sociology of literature, particularly comparative literature. This tradition includes macro approaches that examine literary systems, meso-level approaches that map and explain relational dynamics between actors and institutions, and micro approaches that analyze specific literary works. Literature, situated within cultural sociology, can be understood as an object of study—a way of understanding society and a space for experimentation. This approach is similar to those that advocate for the autonomy of literary texts, both theoretically and empirically. In the late 1990s and early in the first decade of the 2000s, much cultural sociological work was informed by literature in the form of contemporary fiction, because literature was seen as part of an empirical basis for the analysis of—and of more-general theoretical arguments about—the role of art in society. Debates have been initiated because of this research about the role of fiction in sociological research and the epistemological state of fiction. Since the first decade of the 21st century, there has been a shift in focus toward a performance theory, audience engagement, morality, studies of consecration and desecration, cultural intermediaries, influence from French pragmatism and Hartmut Rosa, and theorizations of the novel as an actor. These developments have brought cultural sociology and literature to a highly fruitful point at which cultural sociology might enable computational methods to bring insights that have hitherto been difficult to assess. One such method entails the processing of large corpora of text to study meaning, which in the end always stands at the center of a cultural-sociology approach.