The Intellectual Advantages and Dangers of Borrowing. the Complex Relation Between Literature and Sociology

Literature and sociology are two types of intellectual games. Literature is  driven by the rules of art. The latter foreground such aesthetic techniques as estrangement (anti-essentalism),, meaning gaps ( let the reader guess) and the captive mind ( manipulated emotions).   Sociology is a scientific discipline and is hence bound by the rules of typological construction (essentalism), methodological reflection  (transparent language) and distanced role-taking ( critical empathy).  This does not exclude intellectual borrowing of the insights, imagination and language produced by writers. A good starting-point to reflect on these issues is the methodology of Ervin Goffman. He uses literary sources mainly for their accurate ethnographic observations in particular from the French existentialist writers  Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in order to investigate issues of identity and identity work and more generally the micro norms of interaction between ego- and alter.

   What Goffman tends to ignore though is that in particular Sartre in all his novels and dramas describes alter as “stranger”. There are never any close emotional bonds between ego and alter. In order to fully explore the imaginative possibilities of literature, other French writers such as  Proust and Celine should be looked into as the latter suggest that social relations between strangers can change into intimacy but also return to the civility between strangers in public.

    Nor should sociologists ignore how literary theorists analyze the works of fiction writers. . Reading such work helps us better to understand both what is specific for the literary text but also how the techniques, imagination and language of fiction writers illuminate important aspects of issues that sociologists have tended to leave out in their interpretative work such as the importance of events,  time, place, artifacts, representations, bodies, problemsolving etc.