Topics in Literary Theory and History: Literature and Sociology: Forms of Communal Knowledge

While it is a truism that literature speaks of society, calling the social sciences literary seems unsound. How did this asymmetry evolve and what are its poetic, epistemic, and theoretical effects? This seminar traces the literature-sociology-nexus from its 1800 origins to today. We read sociological case-studies by novelists and experimental fictions by sociologists, study analyses by Simmel, Lukács, Lenk, Barthes, Bourdieu, Lepenies, and Sapiro and investigate key crossovers such as the Collège de Sociologie, the Frankfurt School, ethnographic surrealism, sociology of literature, affect studies, critical fabulation, and autofiction.