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Knowing Society through Literature
Knowing Society through Literature
It was in the 19th century that novelists such as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola, two leading figures in French and European realistic-naturalistic literature, saw their own literary creation as an imaginative or “experimental” way of studying society. At this stage, sociology - literature’s competitor in the field of societal knowledge - was a dawning discipline whose position in the academic world was insecure. At the beginning of the 20th century it became a legitimate discipline, still it would not gain a monopoly in relation to questions regarding societal knowledge.
In addition, literature offers insights into society. In his Temps et Récit (1983), Paul Ricoeur speaks about triple mimesis. In their social interaction people create institutions, rules, common meanings, myths, and representations of the world (mimesis 1). At the next level (mimesis 2), popular stories, literature and other arts describe the first level and take material from it when creating fictional or alternative worlds. Thus, these cultural products give us representations of society and a more or less critical sense of alternative worlds, whose order differs from the normal societal order. Finally, readers or receivers (mimesis 3) recognize that these products function simultaneously as representations of the real world and as critical deviations from it.
Literature’s cognitive function does not, however, limit itself to representational knowledge and alternative or utopian world models. Literature is not a mere description of society; it also shows how people experience their lives in society - or how they experience society’s economic and political structures that cannot, as such, entirely be an object of literary description.
Consequently, literature is a fruitful research object for the sociology of knowledge and the study of ideologies. Likewise, it can be utilized as a documentary material in social-historical research.
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