Table of Contents for The Sociology of Literature
Introduction
Sapiro situates the sociology of literature as a discipline according to its various methods, its history, its animating questions, and its objects of study. She provides an overview of the book's preoccupations and structure, setting the tone for the chapters that follow.
I: Sociological Theories and Approaches to Literature
Chapter I provides an overview of the genesis of the field. Beginning with "protosociological" accounts of literature, which construed the text as a "social fact," Sapiro guides the reader through the successive phases in this intellectual lineage, moving from Madame de Staël's comparisons between national literary traditions, to the literary historical laws of Gustave Lanson, and through the Marxist and structuralist analyses of the work of literature as a product of labor and a reflection of the social relations out of which it emerges. Finally, Sapiro returns us to the present state of the discipline with a discussion of the differences and affordances of the functionalist, interactionist, and relational approaches to the sociology of literature.
II: The Social Conditions for the Production of Literary Works
This chapter explores one of the three primary ways in which literature is taken to mediate the social universe of which it is a product: the conditions of its production. In the first part, Sapiro discusses the many factors that determine the conditions of literary production at any given point in time in a society: the degree of ideological control exercised by the field of power, the social role of the writer, the division of intellectual labor, and the logic of the market. In the second part she explores how the sociology of literature has studied the social recruitment of writers (from which classes and/or gender identities are they recruited?), literary institutions and movements, as well as the development of the profession of "writer" itself, through qualitative and quantitative methods (prosopography, multiple correspondence analysis, network analysis).
III: The Sociology of Literary Works
This chapter shows that despite criticisms to the contrary, the sociology of literature does take the text to be a central object of study. Here, Sapiro focuses on the sociology of specific works, introducing one of the discipline's main tenets: that an author's aesthetic choices must be understood by resituating them within the space of possibles available to writers. Literary form becomes more than a question of artistic genius or a writer's originality; choices made about genres or inscribing a work in a specific school or movement are linked to, not divorced from, the author's social properties. These aesthetic choices also contain strategies for authors to differentiate themselves from other writers. The chapter examines the relationship between literature and identities (class, gender, ethnicity), the nationalization of literature, and its destabilization by migrations and (post)colonialism. But sociology is also interested in the singularity of authors who triggered symbolic revolutions.
IV: Sociology of Reception
This chapter focuses on the sociology of the reception of literary works. Sapiro shows the importance of the individual actors as well as the institutions that mediate the reception of a given text, ranging from publishers, translators, and literary prize juries to political parties. She then makes the argument for both literary trials and literary festivals as rich sites of potential further research. Beyond institutions, the chapter looks at reading practices as well as reading publics. Approaching the study of literature through both the circulation of texts and the sociology of reading enables the rich study of book clubs, written correspondence between authors and their readers, the trajectories of individual readers, and the social construction of distinctions between high and popular literature. Sapiro explores and weighs the merits of each of these approaches. The conclusion opens to questions about contemporary ethical and political receptions and "cancellations."
Conclusion
The conclusion briefly summarizes the major topics, themes, and ideas covered in the chapters, especially the types of social mediations between the text and its conditions of production. Sapiro then remarks upon the work that remains to be done, and the avenues of research that remain to be explored.