Knowing through feeling : the aesthetic structure of a novel and the iconic experience of reading
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | American Journal of Cultural Sociology |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41290-021-00130-5 |
| Keywords | Sociology of literature; Iconicity; Social aesthetics; Structural aesthetics; Post-communism; Lyrical sociology |
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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 article 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 hardly 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 Roman Jakobson and 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. I demonstrate my approach by analyzing the Czech novel Bliss was it in Bohemia by Michal Viewegh (Bliss was it in Bohemia, Jantar Publishing, London, 1992). Building on social aesthetics, I discuss implications of my model for sociological theory, textual representation, and sociological explanation in general. |
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