Theorizing the Social through Literary Fiction: Toward a Social-Aesthetic Dialogue

I propose a model for theorizing social phenomena through literary fiction, drawing on Georg Simmel’s Soziologische Aesthetik and Arnold Berleant’s social aesthetics. Unlike classical emergentism in sociology, Simmel’s “relational emergence” emphasizes non-hierarchical and non-causal interactions, suggesting that emergent social entities form through unique constellations of relations that may also solidify into enduring cultural structures. Literary texts, through their “aesthetic totality” (as in the sociology of literature by Lukács and Goldmann), enact these dynamic interactions within the reading process, functioning as a laboratory of social becoming and dissolving. Particularly, I argue for a sensitive social-aesthetic dialogue with literary works as a viable alternative for theorizing “nondeclarative cultural knowledge” (Rotolo 2022, Lizardo 2017).

As an example, I demonstrate theorizing via two literary works that vary greatly in style, scope, level of literary consecration, and the socio-historical milieu of their origin: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930) and Normal People (2018) by Sally Rooney. By selecting such vastly different texts, I aim to show how particular ways of literary theorizing are bound with literature’s specific intra- and extra-textual attributes. On a more abstract level, both novels excel at presenting (rather than re-presenting) the dynamic interplay between human bodies and environments as well as collective representations and cultural structures.

Rather than locating social action within the “physicalism” of (neuro)cognitive cultural sociology, or in collective representations, as in Durkheimian sociology (see the debate on “The neuro-cognitive turn in cultural sociology” in Smith 2020), literary texts allow to elaborate social action through the Simmelian Stimmung—the mood, also conceptualized as attunement or atmosphere. By means of their aesthetic forms, novels capture social moods without fixing them in discursive definitions, enabling what I call social theorizing in “happening.”