Theorizing through Literature

Sociology and literary fiction have long competed and complemented each other as sources of knowledge about the social world. Novelists like Honoré de Balzac and H.G. Wells proclaimed their fiction sociology, while sociologists used literature to articulate their sociological concepts. Pierre Bourdieu used Flaubert’s novels not only to illustrate but to develop the concept of habitus, and W.B. DuBois experimented with more literary forms of writing—to name just two prominent examples.

The history of boundary work to exclude literary fiction from the realm of “real sociology” and the resulting scientification and institutionalization of the discipline are well documented (see, for example, Wolf Lepenies’ Between Literature and Science). But sociology and fiction are still entangled in a number of ways, particularly in the field of social theory, where literary imagination is used to initiate and enable theoretical creativity and undercut the binary logic of “theory” vs. “empirical data.” Social theorists such as Axel Honneth, Eva Illouz and Alain Ehrenberg regularly draw on novels to inquire recent relations between individual subjects and society. Others, like Frederic Jameson and McKenzie Wark, make use of the world-building techniques of speculative literature to theorize phenomena like climate change and the anthropocene, which challenge traditional social theoretical concepts. In my presentation I identify and discuss the different uses of literary fiction in contemporary social theory and place them within the broader debate about methods of theorizing that Richard Swedberg, Andrew Abbott and others have initiated in recent years.