Publication details
More Than a Product: Strengthening Literature in Sociological Analysis
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | Literature is more than a reflection of social structure. Literary texts communicate emotions to the reader by means of their aesthetical function. Demonstrating the importance of aesthetics in the sociological analysis of literature, (1) I summarize the historical development of social knowledge which is usually referred to as “sociology of literature”. (2) I discuss the uses and limits of the dominant Bourdieusian approach towards literature. (3) Building on the strong program of cultural sociology, I provide an outline of the concept of iconicity and the phenomenology of reading to sketch a novel approach in the sociology of literature, which is explanatorily powerful, but also sensitive to meaning structures as well as the reading experience of literary texts. In the final chapter, (4) I demonstrate this approach in analyzing the novel Sister by Czech writer Jáchym Topol, a literary reflection on (and not just of) the Velvet Revolution. |