Publication details
The Sociological Truth of Fiction: The Aesthetic Structure of a Novel and the Iconic Experience of Reading
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | 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-a-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. |