TY  - JOUR
TI  - Fiction and Social Knowledge: Towards a Strong Program in the Sociology of Literature
T2  - The Russian Sociological Review
IS  - The Russian Sociological Review
KW  - sociology of literature
KW  - cultural sociology
KW  - social theory
KW  - social knowledge
KW  - theorizing
KW  - aesthetic experience
KW  - fiction
AB  - Following the strong program in cultural sociology, I propose a strong program in the sociology of liter-ature, which treats literary pieces rightly as relatively autonomous cultural entities and "independent var-iables". To outline the epistemological foundations of the new research program, I compare how social knowledge comes into existence through the sociological text and the text of literary fiction. I discuss the representation of social reality in interpretive research, with Isaac Reed’s book Interpretation and Social Knowledge as a starting point. To claim literary autonomy, I outline some of the aspects which social the-ory shares with literary fiction. I am mainly interested in how social theory and literary fiction mediate social knowledge to their readers via the aesthetic experience. I identify two main categories of social knowledge mediated by literature: existential understanding and Zeitgeist. Discussing the sociological treatment of several novels, I look at how these two categories intertwine and support each other to create colorful, sensitive, but also robust and deep social knowledge, which condenses aesthetic, existential, and non-discursive aspects of social experience together with the "big picture" of whole societies. I argue that only by overcoming the often-assumed inferiority of literature in sociological research can sociology real-ize its full potential in understanding the meanings of social life.
AU  - Jan Vana
UR  - https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2020-19-4/430489007.html
PY  - 2020
SP  - 14-35
VL  - 19