The Sociology of Literature

The Sociology of Literature

GISÈLE SAPIRO

Translated by Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

English translation © 2023 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

The Sociology of Literature was originally published in French in 2014 under the title La sociologie de la littérature, © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2014.

Preface and translators’ note © 2023 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sapiro, Gisèle, author.

Title: The sociology of literature / Gisèle Sapiro ; translated by Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman.

Other titles: Sociologie de la littérature. English

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Originally published in French in 2014 under the title La sociologie de la littérature. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023009017 (print) | LCCN 2023009018 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503633179 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503637597 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503637603 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Literature and society.

Classification: LCC PN51 .S3125 2023 (print) | LCC PN51 (ebook) | DDC 306.4/2--dc23/eng/20230607

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009017

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009018

Cover design: Jason Anscomb

Typeset by Elliott Beard in Miller Text 10.5/15

To my students

Contents

Translators’ Note

Preface

Introduction

I. Sociological Theories and Approaches to Literature

II. The Social Conditions for the Production of Literary Works

III. The Sociology of Literary Works

IV. The Sociology of Reception

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Translators’ Note

To grasp the full import of this book, one need only begin at the beginning, with Gisèle Sapiro’s dedication: À mes étudiants (To my students). This is a book for students of research, whether they be found in doctoral programs or in faculty positions with decades of tenure behind them. Sapiro, like her mentor Pierre Bourdieu, takes very seriously the task of combining multiple roles that, for many, are nonjoinable: the pedagogue, scholar, and public intellectual. Her stature in France as an authority and frequent commentator on cultural politics has not kept her from the classroom. If Sapiro’s byline is often encountered in the pages of Le Monde, L’Humanité, Libération, and AOC (Analyse Opinion Critique), she herself is usually found among her students, each of whom is working to deepen the discipline she has so fiercely championed for more than two decades. We see this book as belonging in the classroom as well; it is just as much a document for pedagogy as it is a tool and resource for research.

In France, where the sociology of literature took root, the present text is a crystallization of methods, histories, and approaches that, to one degree or another, will be familiar to sociologists and literary critics alike; it offers a program for further understanding and pursuing a discipline whose merits have long been proven in that country. For readers from the English-speaking world, we hope that The Sociology of Literature will open up broad new avenues for research and intellectual experimentation. That La Sociologie de la littérature (2014) was originally published in the Repères series at La Découverte speaks to the esteem in which this branch of sociology is held in France. The aim of the Repères collection is to offer rigorous, clear, and accessible introductions to the most important disciplines and subdisciplines in the sciences, each volume being no longer than 128 pages, costing no more than 11 euros, and taking the form of a pocket book. That everything one needs to know about the sociology of literature might be found in one’s coat pocket alongside, say, everything one needs to know about economics is evidence of the discipline’s hard-won institutionalization in France.

In the United States, the story is rather different. The sociology of literature has thus far made its deepest inroads in literary studies. Following the publication of Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art (1996) in English, American literary critics, long accustomed to borrowing methods from other disciplines for productive use in their own, found a new wealth of possibilities in what has since become a landmark text in the humanities. There is an incongruity here that can only be attributed to the peculiar transformations that attend what Bourdieu called the international circulation of ideas: in France, the sociology of literature is resolutely a branch of sociology, not literary studies—and Sapiro herself is undeniably seen more as a sociologist than as a literary scholar. The same went for Bourdieu. This is not, however, to scold American readers for mistaking the contents of this book and others like it as being fit for the wrong discipline. Quite the contrary: in their idiosyncratic American reception, the sociologists of literature have discovered new freedoms and possibilities of their own, realizing that here, perhaps more than in France, they have an opportunity to rub shoulders with literary criticism and engage in interdisciplinary dialogue with its practitioners.

It was therefore our aim, in translating this book, to offer American literary critics and sociologists alike a foundational text—a handbook—upon which to base their future research and collaborations. The Sociology of Literature, then, is presented here not so much as an intervention as a rallying point, where scholars from varying fields can take stock of and rearticulate the work they have already been doing, and can borrow the tools and principles that might help them push ahead.

The Sociology of Literature is also offered as a kind of reset to what has, until now, often been a contentious (if sometimes ill-informed) debate around the sociology of literature in the American academic context. Most commonly, the sociological approach to literary study has been criticized by literary scholars for reducing texts to their social environments, and by sociologists for privileging an elite and unuseful object of study. As will be clear to the reader of this book, neither of these critiques is an accurate assessment of the sociology of literature. As with any interdisciplinary effort, the challenges of bringing the sociological perspective to bear upon literary study—or the literary perspective to bear upon sociology—should not be taken lightly. But thanks to Sapiro’s work, we now know what tools to wield and what paths to explore.

The challenges of translating this volume have been both interesting and numerous. Most important to us was to effect a certain continuity with the better known books on the sociology of literature already published in English. Thus, whereas Bourdieu’s term l’espace des possibles entered the English lexicon almost three decades ago as the space of possibles, we have retained this translation—even as we might, in another reception context, have gone with space of possibilities. Certain terms that might jar or startle as somewhat foreign-sounding (e.g., the use of consecration in the context of awarding a literary prize) have been retained for that very reason: Sapiro, who worked closely with us on this translation, wanted readers to pause over the words and phrases that convey the most important concepts in the sociology of culture. Other decisions were exacting for reasons unrelated to the business of finding le mot juste. Although some have called into question the appropriateness of the term field, given its connotative associations with the historical practice of slavery, we have preserved it precisely because, in borrowing the term as a metaphor for his own sociological theory, Bourdieu had in mind another sort of field entirely: the magnetic field, rife with charges, currents, and vectors—a perfect image of the dynamic social arrangement he set out to describe.

Above all, we have tried to preserve the clarity and grace of the original text for you, the reader, a student much like ourselves.

Madeline Bedecarré

Ben Libman

Preface

The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have brought the question of the complex relationship between representation and reality back to the center of public debate. Literature is a cultural form that can either convey existing representations, including racist, classist, sexist, and transphobic ones—and those peddling the hierarchization of legitimate identities and all other forms of social disqualification—or else subvert them. Literature is in this sense a site for the reproduction or subversion of symbolic violence, understood as a form of violence that is masked because euphemized, and which thus contributes to reproducing forms of domination by inculcating them as natural, and therefore legitimate, among the dominated (Bourdieu 2002b). This power proper to literature, as to other cultural forms, makes it not only an object of worship and a source for exegesis, but also the object of symbolic struggles, censorship, lawsuits, boycotts, and cancellations. Yet traditional literary studies, especially in the wake of New Criticism and structuralism, have tended to focus on the text and its specific forms. The sociology of literature does not reduce literature to representations of the social world, but instead apprehends literature in its different modes of social existence, from its most materialized forms (the book as object) to its cognitive dimensions, and through its development into literary genres, its classification in aesthetic currents, its appropriations by political movements, and so on.

It is surprising that in the United States, where consciousness of the power of cultural forms has been sharpened by feminist, queer, and antiracist movements, the sociology of literature remains so marginal. This is no doubt due to disciplinary compartmentalization, exacerbated by the separation of the humanities from the social sciences, as well as to the lack of interest in literature among sociologists, and in sociology among literary scholars. There are certainly deeper reasons why this state of affairs is not specific to the English-speaking world, like the fact that literary scholars fear a sacrilegious sociological reductionism, which reminds them of Marxism, and that literature can be seen as a futile or elitist object in the eyes of sociologists. (I myself was trained in literary theory and philosophy, but I discovered sociology, then a somewhat scorned discipline, only belatedly through Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of literature, and subsequently became a sociologist.) These reasons have very old origins, outlined in the first chapter of this book. The purpose of the book, however, is to illustrate all the benefits that both disciplines stand to gain from the intermingling of their approaches and lines of questioning.

Published in 2014 as part of La Découverte’s Repères collection, the remit of which is to take stock of a research domain and propose new directions for it (the collection is aimed primarily at students, but also at researchers engaging in the discipline), this book was initially intended for a French-speaking audience, and was based on a predominantly French-language corpus and on examples of research conducted for the most part in the French-speaking world (including work by researchers from other countries). Although the format of the collection severely limited the breadth of references I could cite, this did not amount to a major distortion of the subject matter, because it is mainly in the French linguistic space that the sociology of literature has, since its latest upsurge in the 1970s, evolved. Moreover, the examples aim above all to open up avenues of research that can be transposed to other sociocultural contexts, laying the foundations for a comparative approach that, as Bourdieu says, can only be carried out from system to system (Bourdieu 1991a: 630–31). This book has so far been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish, and Bulgarian, and it serves—in South America in particular, but also elsewhere (in Germany, for instance)—as a reference, along with Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art and Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, for the development of research in this domain.

In the English-speaking world, where work has long been done on the history of censorship and the social construction of authorship in the wake of Foucault (1999), and where queer theory and feminist and postcolonial studies have drawn attention to the gendered and racialized aspects of cultural works, there has recently been a growing interest in other objects of study in the sociology of literature, such as creative writing programs, literary agents, the editorial process, translation, reading clubs, and literary festivals. This is why the English-language edition of this book is an expanded edition, taking into account as much as possible these recent developments, with an updated bibliography, mainly in English and French, in the hope that it can contribute to the flourishing of the field.

I concluded my last book, Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur? (Can We Separate the Work from the Author? [Sapiro 2020b]), by writing that while boycotting is a right, analysis is nevertheless preferable to erasure, because the erasure of a work, especially in the case of the classics, risks wiping out the traces of symbolic violence along with it, and so generating a collective amnesia. By contrast, the sociology of literature can be a tool for anamnesis of this symbolic violence and the role that literary works may have had in its reproduction or subversion.

Gisèle Sapiro

PARIS

February 6, 2023

This preface was written by the author specially for the English-language edition.

Introduction

The sociology of literature approaches literature as a social fact. This entails a two-pronged examination: the study of literature as a social phenomenon, in which a great number of institutions and individuals who produce, consume, and judge literary texts participate; and the study of how time periods and social issues are represented in literary texts.

This seemingly simple proposition raises a number of questions. What defines an authoritative text? A work as it was published by its author? But in this case, what to make of Kafka’s works published by Max Brod after his death? or of different versions of a text published by an author? or of variations found in manuscripts? Should we focus on the genesis of a text and understand it, like Sartre, as part of a larger creative project? or, otherwise, on its interpretation, which can vary depending on the readers and the time period?

Indeed, the meaning of a literary text or of any cultural production cannot be reduced to the author’s intent. Apart from the fact that authors are not always conscious of what they do, the meaning of the work depends on two factors that elude the creator. First, the meaning of a work resides not merely in its internal construction, as hermeneutic criticism claims, but also in a national or international space of possibles (as defined by Bourdieu),¹ the contours of which are traced by the totality of symbolic productions, present and past, among which it is situated at the time of its publication or republication. The singular work thus defines itself through its relationship to other cultural productions in terms of themes, genres, composition, and devices. The literary work is a vehicle for representations of the social world, which can be more or less shared by contemporaries (depending on the social group: class, gender, nation, ethnic group, and so on) and can be found in nonliterary texts. Which leads us to the question that specifically concerns us here: what is the relevant context for understanding a work of literature? Is it the author’s unique biography, which Sartre prioritized in his study of Flaubert, the social group (or class) which the author originally hails from or belongs to, or the social characteristics of the reading public? Is the relevant context to be found in national literature, on which literary history was based, or in world literature (Goethe’s Weltliteratur)? Which is more important: the social conditions of production and circulation of literary works, as contended by the founders of cultural studies? or the categories of understanding of the culture to which the work belongs, following the neo-Kantian tradition from Cassirer to Panofsky?

The second factor concerns the appropriations and uses that are made of a text, the meaning it is given, and the attempts at annexation to which it is subjected. These processes of reception are not external to the history of literary production. First, the reception of a work of literature has effects not only on its social meaning, but also on its position in the hierarchy of symbolic goods, which is assigned by its critical reception, its distribution in bookstores (for instance, placement in displays or position on bestseller lists), and so on. Second, the reception of literary works often has effects on authors themselves, who can be led to change or adjust their creative project depending on the reactions and expectations provoked by this reception. Third, the (re)appropriations of literary works from the past, or from other cultures, are at the