Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Philippe Desan, and Wendy
            Griswold
         Editors' Introduction: Mirrors, Frames, and Demons: Reflections on
            the Sociology of Literature
         The sociology of literature, in the first of many paradoxes,
            elicits negations before assertions. It is not an established field
            or academic discipline. The concept as such lacks both intellectual
            and institutional clarity. Yet none of these limitations affects
            the vitality and rigor of the larger enterprise. We use the
            sociology of literature here to refer to the cluster of
            intellectual ventures that originate in one overriding conviction:
            the conviction that literature and society necessarily explain each
            other. Scholars and critics of all kinds congregate under this
            outsize umbrella only to differ greatly in their sense of what they
            do and what sociology of literature does. They subscribe to a wide
            range of theories and methods. Many would not accept the sociology
            of literature as an appropriate label for their own work; other
            would refuse it to their colleagues. Nevertheless, every advocate
            agrees that a sociological practice is essential to literature. For
            the sociology of literature does not constitute just one more
            approach to literature. Because it insists upon a sociology of
            literary knowledge and literary practice within the study of
            literature, the sociology of literature raises questions basic to
            all intellectual inquiry.
            The sociology of literature begins in diversity. The way that is
            combines the ancient traditions of art with the modern practices of
            social science makes the very term something of an oxymoron. There
            is not one sociology of literature, there are many sociological
            practices of literature, each of which operates within a particular
            intellectual tradition and specific institutional context. These
            practices cross basic divisions within the contemporary
            intellectual field, especially within the university. Inherently
            interdisciplinary, the sociology of literature is subject to
            constant reformulation as scholars re-evaluate their disciplines.
            In consequence, disciplinary boundaries seem less rigid, less
            logical, and, hence, less authoritative than ever before. Even
            so and this is another paradox of the sociology of
            literature any sociological conception of literature is best
            situated in terms of an original discipline and its institutional
            setting. However frequently individual scholars cross over
            disciplinary lines, the fundamental divisions retain their force.
             
            Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson is professor of French at the
            University of Illinois at Chicago; she is author of Literary
            France: The Making of a Culture. Philippe Desan,whose Naissance de
            la method: Machiavelle, la Ramée, Bodin, Montaigne, Descartes was
            published in 1987, is an assistant professor at the University of
            Chicago. Wendy Griswold,associate professor of sociology at the
            University of Chicago, recently published Renaissance Revivals:
            City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576-1980.
Robert Weimann
         Text, Author-Function, and Appropriation in Modern Narrative:
            Toward a Sociology of Representation
         To talk about the sociology of literary representation is, first
            and foremost, to propose to historicize representational activity
            at that crucial point where its social and linguistic dimensions
            intersect.1 The troublesome incongruity between these two
            dimensions need not be minimized, but it can be grappled with as
            soon as the presuppositions of either the hegemony of the subject
            or that of language itself are questioned. In this view, the
            position of George Lukács (not to mention that of Erich Auerbach or
            even that of the more traditional sociologist of literary
            referentiality) tends to ignore the state of extreme vulnerability
            and recurrent jeopardy in which representation has always found
            itself, just as Michel Foucault's diametrically opposed view
            of the ultimate hegemony of discourse obliterates or displaces a
            lot of unbroken contemporary representational practice. Even more
            important, both these quite different approaches may be said to
            appear monistic in that the gaps and links between what is
            representing what is represented are viewed either in terms of
            closure and continuity or in terms of rupture and discontinuity.
            But as I shall proceed to glance at some representational
            strategies in the late modern period, the question needs to be
            faced whether it is not precisely in these gaps and links, and in
            the way in which, simultaneously, the gaps are closed and the links
            are broken up, that historical activity can be seen to assert
            itself.
            If the contradiction of system and event, of predetermination and
            performance can be seen to affect representational activity, and if
            this contradiction can at all be formulated in terms of a
            sociological Erkenntnisinteresse,issue of historicity must be
            discussed on more than one level: not only on the level of what is
            represented (which would reduce this project to some genealogy of
            the signified) but also on the level of rupture between them as
            well as their interdependence) together and to attempt to
            interconnect the semiotic problematic of signification and the
            extratextual dimension of representativeness, as involving
            changeful relations of writing, reading, social reproduction, and
            political power. In this view, the use of signs, although never
            quite reducible to a referential function, must be reconsidered and
            this question needs to be asked: under which conditions and in
            which respects would it be possible to talk of sociology in that
            area of instability itself which marks the relations between
            signifier and signified, between the author's language and
            the reader's meaning?
             
            Robert Weimann is professor of English and American literature at
            the Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte, Akademie der Künste,
            Berlin DDR. His books in English include Shakespeare and the
            Popular Tradition in Theater and Structure and Society in Literary
            History. His most recent book-length study in German is Shakespeare
            und die Macht der Mimesis: Repråsentation und Autoritåt im
            Elisabethanischen Theater.
Sandy Petrey
         The Reality of Representation: Between Marx and Balzac
         The starting point for my reading of the exchanges between Marx and
            Balzac is the repetition in The Eighteenth Brumaireof a striking
            image employed in Colonel Chabert to represent the force of
            ideology as experienced by a man forcibly set outside the
            conventions it endorses. Balzac first: "The social and
            judicial world weighted on his breast like a nightmare."3
            Marx's appropriation occurs in a much-quoted meditation on
            the past as impediment to the future.
            Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
            please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
            themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and
            transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead
            generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.4
            What is the (material) weight of an (immaterial) nightmare, and why
            do Balzac and Marx agree that invoking it is a valid means to
            express humanity's relation to its history?5
             
            4. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York,
            1963), p. 15; my emphasis. Further references to this work,
            abbreviated EB,will be included in the text.
            5. In French and German: "Le monde social et judiciare lui
            pesait sur la poitrine comme un cauchemar"; "Die
            Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem
            Gehirne der Lebenden." This strikes me as so obvious a
            borrowing that I have to wonder why it does not seem to be
            generally known. On contributing factor may be that the standard
            French translation of The Eighteenth Burmairegives a fanciful
            version of the sentence in Marx: "La tradition de toutes les
            generations mortes pèse d'un poids très lourd sur le cerveau
            des vivants" (Marx, Le 18 brumaire de Louis Bonaparte [Paris,
            1969], p. 15). Does this poids très lourd come from a misreading of
            ein Alpas eine Alp?
             
            Sandry Petrey is professor of French and comparative literature at
            the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The author of
            History in the Text: Quatrevingt-Treize and the French
            Revolution,he is completing a book entitled Realism and Revolution.
Terry Eagleton
         Two Approaches in the Sociology of Literature
         There are two main ways in which an interest in the sociology of
            literature can be justified. The first form of justification is (in
            the epistemological sense of the term) realist: literature is in
            fact deeply conditioned by its social context, and any critical
            account of it which omits this fact is therefore automatically
            deficient. The second way is pragmatist: literature is in fact
            shaped by all kinds of factors and readable in all sorts of
            contexts, but highlighting its social determinants is useful and
            desirable from a particular political standpoint.
            Both of these cases would seem to have something going for them.
            Hardly anybody would want to deny that literature is in an
            important sense a social product; but this claim is so general that
            a specifically "sociological" treatment of literary
            works does not necessarily follow from it. Metaphors and line
            endings, after all, are also in some sense social products, so that
            to attend to these elements of a literary text is not necessarily
            to deny the work's sociality. "Social product"
            would seem too comfortably broad a category, just as
            "economic product" would seem too crippingly narrow. A
            problem with the realist case about the sociology of literature,
            then, is that it is not very clear what exactly is being claimed.
            The pragmatist case would seem a persuasive rationale for, say, a
            feminist reading of Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism,since
            few people would want to claim that the poem was in some central
            way about patriarchal relations in the sense that The Rape of the
            Lock is. A Marxist critic who attended to questions of social class
            in Treasure Island,perhaps placing Long John Silver in the context
            of the British shop stewards' movement and celebrating his
            antagonism to the gentry, would not necessarily be committed to
            holding that these issues were "in fact" crucial to the
            text; he or she would insist instead that they should be brought to
            light because they were crucial to history and society in general.
             
            Terry Eagleton's recent works include collected
            essays Against the Grainand William Shakespeare as well
            as a novel, Saints and Scholars. His work in progress is on the
            ideology of the aesthetic.
Jean-Marie Apostolidès
         Molière and the Sociology of Exchange
         The method chosen here draws on concepts borrowed from sociology
            and anthropology. This double conceptual approach is necessary for
            a society divided between values inherited from medieval
            Christianity and precapitalist practices. Seventeenth-century
            France did not think of itself as a class society but as a society
            of orders. Since sociology is a system of knowledge whose concepts
            are taken from an imaginary construct, it is thus more suited to
            analyzing bourgeois society than societies in transition.6 In
            trying to measure the past with the aid of tools forged in and for
            contemporary societies, the sociologist runs the risk of only
            measuring an artifact, produced by his theories in the field of
            history. Hence the need for the anthropological concepts, including
            the notion of exchange, among others, whether material (the
            exchange of goods), symbolic (the exchange of signs), or sexual
            (the exchange of women).
            This approach will bring to light the contradictions underlying the
            society of the ancient régime. Whereas an ordinary sociohistorical
            approach views the reign of Louis XIV as unified under a dogmatic
            classicism, the socioanthropological approach stresses the tensions
            and oppositions running through this society. Classicism appears
            then as a façade covering up the change that it cannot imagine.
            This "spectacle"7 makes it possible to unite
            contradictory social practices, both those produced by consumption
            and which originate in the medieval economy (based on the gift/
            countergift and service) and those belonging to the early
            accumulation of capital which sketch future bourgeois economic
            practices.
             
            6. See Cornelius Catoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of
            Society,trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
            7. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle,rev. English ed.
            (Detroit, 1977).
             
            Jean-Marie Apostolidès is professor of French literature at
            Stanford University. His publications include Le roi-machine, Les
            metamorphoses de Tintin,andLe prince sacrifié.Alice Musick McLean,a
            Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, is specializing in
            medieval narrative and the literature of the fantastic.
J. Paul Hunter
         "News, and new Things": Contemporarneity and the Early_English
            Novel
         The novel represents a formal attempt to come to terms with
            innovation and originality and to accept the limitations of
            tradition; it reflects the larger cultural embracing of the present
            moment as a legitimate subject not only for passing conversation
            but for serious discourse. For at least a half century before the
            novel emerged, the world of print had experimented in assuming,
            absorbing, and exploiting that new cultural consciousness based on
            human curiosity on the one hand "preparing"
            readers for novels and on the other offering later writers of
            novels some sense of potential subject matter and potential form, a
            sense of how the present could be won over to serious literature.
            The process was a curious and unstructured one; in its early
            manifestations it hardly seemed destined to lead to a significant
            new literary form. Even in retrospect, the print novelties of the
            turn of the century hardly seem part of a teleology of form or
            thought, but the broad ferment that authenticated the new, together
            with the apparent permanence that print seemed to bestow on
            accounts of the temporary and passing, ultimately led to a mind and
            art that transcended occasions and individuals even though it
            engaged them first of all energetically, enthusiastically,
            evangelically. The first fruits of the modern moment-centered
            consciousness were not very promising, but the emergence of that
            consciousness enabled, when other cultural contexts were right, an
            altogether new aesthetic and a wholly different relation between
            life and literature.
             
            J. Paul Hunter,professor of English at the University of Chicago,
            is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim, Occasional Form,and of a
            forthcoming book on literacy, readership, and the contexts of early
            English fiction, Before Novels.
Janice Radway
         The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader: On_the_Uses_of
            "Serious" Fiction
         If one accepts the social hierarchy that this taste structure
            masks, it is easy to accept the validity of the particular criteria
            which serve as the working test of excellence. In fact, the high
            value placed on rationality, complexity, irony, reflexivity,
            linguistic innovation, and the "disinterested"
            contemplation of the well-wrought artifact makes sense within
            cultural institutions devoted to the improvement of the
            individuality, autonomy, and productive competence of the already
            privileged individuals who come to them for instruction and
            advice.8 Appreciation for the technical fine points of aesthetic
            achievement is also understandable among people whose daily work
            centers on the business of discrimination. But it is worth keeping
            in mind that the critical dismissal of literary works and
            institutions that do not embody these values as failures is an
            exercise of power which rules out the possibility of recognizing
            that such works and institutions might be valuable to others
            because they perform functions more in keeping with their own
            somewhat different social position, its material constraints, and
            ideological concerns. The essay critical dismissal of the Club and
            other "popularizers" is an act of exclusion that
            banishes those who might mount even the most minimal of challenges
            to the culture and role of the contemporary intellectual by
            proclaiming their own right to create, use, and value books for
            different purposes.
            My preoccupation with the Book-of-the-Month Club arises, then, out
            of a prior interest in the way books are variously written,
            produced, marketed, read, and evaluated in contemporary American
            culture. My subjects might best be described as ways of writing
            rather than Literature, ways of reading rather than texts.9 I have
            begun to examine the Club's editorial operation with the
            intention of eventually comparing the manner, purpose, and
            substance of the editors' choice of books with the choices of
            actual Book-of-the-Month Club members. Such a comparison seems
            potentially interesting for a variety of reasons.
             
            8. For a discussion of the connections between the social position
            and role of literary academics and the values they promote through
            the process of canonization, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational
            Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New
            York, 1985), esp. pp. 186-201.
            9. See, for instance, my earlier effort to specify how a group of
            women actually read and evaluate individual books in the much-
            maligned romance genre, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and
            Popular Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984). I am indebted to Mary
            Pratt's discussion ("Towards a Critical Cultural
            Practice," paper presented at the Conference on the Agenda of
            Literary Studies, Marquette University, 8-9 Oct. 1982) of the
            concept of "literariness" and the way it disciplines
            ideologically this particular way of describing my own interests.
             
            Janice Radway is an associate professor of American civilization at
            the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Reading the
            Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature(1984) and is a
            former editor of American Quarterly.This article is part of a
            larger study, the working title of which is "The Book-of-the-
            Month Club and the General Reader: The Transformation of Literary
            Production in the Twentieth Century."
Pierre Bourdieu
         Flaubert's Point of View
         The break necessary to establish a rigorous science of cultural
            works is something more and something else than a simple
            methodological reversal.1 It implies a true conversion of the
            ordinary way of thinking and living the intellectual enterprise. It
            is a matter of breaking the narcissistic relationship inscribed in
            the representation of intellectual work as a "creation"
            and which excludes as the expression par excellence of
            "reductionist sociology" the effort to subject the
            artist and the work of art to a way of thinking that is doubly
            objectionable since it is both genetic and generic.
            It would be easy to show what the most different kinds of analysis
            of the work of art owe to the norms that require treating works in
            and for themselves, with no reference to the social conditions of
            their production. Thus in the now-classic Theory of Literature,René
            Wellek and Austin Warren seem to advocate "an explanation in
            terms of the personality and the life of the writer." In
            fact, because they (no doubt along with most of their readers)
            accept the ideology of the "man of genius" they are
            committed, in their own terms, to "one of the oldest and
            best-established methods of literary study" which seeks
            the explanatory principle of a work in the author taken in
            isolation (the uniqueness of a work being considered a
            characteristic of the "creator").2 In fact, this
            explanatory principle resides in the relationship between the
            "space" of works in which each particular work is taken
            and the "space" of authors in which each cultural
            enterprise is constituted. Similarly, when Sartre takes on the
            project of specifying the meditations through which society
            determined Flaubert, the individual, he attributes to those factors
            that can be perceived from that point of view that is, to
            social class as refracted through a family structure what are
            instead the effects of generic factors influencing every writer in
            an artistic field that is itself in a subordinate position in the
            field of power and also the effects specific to all writers who
            occupy the same position as Flaubert within the artistic field.
             
            1. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Intellectual Field and Creative
            Project," trans. Sian France, Social Science Information 8
            (Apr. 1969): 89-119; originally published as "Champ
            intellectual et projet créateur," Les Temps moderns no. 246
            (Nov. 1966): 865-906. See also Bourdieu, "Champ du pouvoir,
            champ intellectual et habitus de classe," Scolies1 (1971): 7-
            26, and Bourdieu, "The Genesis of the Concepts of Habitus and
            Field," trans. Channa Newman, Sociocriticism no. 2 (Dec.
            1985): 11-24.
            2. René Welleck and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York,
            1956) p. 69.
             
            Pierre Bourdieu holds the chair of sociology at the Collège de
            France and is director of the Centre de Sociologie européenne at
            the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Among his most
            recent works are Distinction (1984), Homo Academicus (1984), and
            Choses Dites (1987).
Alain Viala
         Prismatic Effects
         In recent years the sociology of literature has developed on the
            basis of another formula: literature is part of the larger social
            order. It is not the "expression of society" but an
            integral part of it. The idea is simple, the implications are
            great. Literature as part of the social order goes beyond a study
            of the external social manifestations of literature, beyond the
            sociology of the book, author, and reader practiced, for example,
            by Robert Escarpit a sociology which leads inevitably to a
            positivist outlook.5 Nor can we be satisfied with a wholesale
            borrowing of sociological concepts that does no more than provide
            the tools for arguments in favor of one or another theory of
            literature.6 Whatever the interest of these theories (and sometimes
            it is very great), a sociology of literature becomes possible only
            when it includes the sociology of the theories elaborated on the
            subject itself. (So far my purpose has led me gradually to
            substitute the term "sociology of literature" for
            "literature and society." Philosophical or political
            theories can be propounded on the relations between literature and
            society, but these relations can be studied scientifically only in
            sociological terms.)
             
            5. See Robert Escarpit, Sociologie de la literature (Paris, 1958).
            See also Escarpit et al., Le Littéraire et le social: Éléments pour
            une sociologie de la literature (Paris, 1970).
            6. Pierre V. Zima's presentations of the sociology of
            literature seem to be taking him toward this failing. See Zima,
            Pour une sociologie du texte littéraire (Paris, 1978).
             
            Alain Viala is a professor of the Université de Paris
            II Sorbonne Nouvelle. Author of Naissance de
            l'écrivain: Sociologie de la literature à l'âge
            classique (1985) and Les Institutions de la vie littéraire en
            France au XVIIe siècle (1985), he is currently working on studies
            of the sociology of literature, Racine, and literary strategies.
            Paula Wissing is a free-lance translator and editor.
John Sutherland
         Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of_Literary_Sociology
         For most literary sociologists serious modern work starts with
            Robert Escarpit's Sociologie de la Littérature (1958), a book
            which proposes that sociology (or a sociological perspective) can
            usefully explain how literature operates as a social institution.
            Subsequent Escarpit-inspired work on the literary enterprise covers
            topics such as the profession of authorship; the stratified
            "circuits" (Escarpit's hallmark concept) of
            production, distribution, and consumption; and the commodity aspect
            of literature. Critics have objected that Escarpit's
            increasingly macroquantitative and statistics-bound procedures
            bleach out literary and ideological texture. And his model of
            literature as discrete social system encourages the abstract model
            making which Raymond Williams despises.1 But, whatever its
            shortomcings, Escarpit's definition of literary product and
            practice as social faits (not facts, but things made) forms an
            essential starting point for the sociologist intending to
            investigate the apparatuses of literature.
            In what follows, I shall mainly fix on a problem currently
            disabling constructive research on the literary-sociological lines
            projected by Escarpit: namely, scholarly ignorance about book trade
            and publishing history technicalities. This sets up, I shall
            suggest, a large and troubling hole at the centre of the subject,
            and there is little indication, at this stage, how or when the hole
            is to be filled.
             
            1. See Raymond Williams, "Literature and Sociology,"
            Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London,
            1980), pp. 11-30.
             
            John Sutherlandis professor of literature at the California
            Institute of Technology. His books include Fiction and the Fiction
            Industry (1978), Bestsellers (1980), and Offensive Literature
            (1982). He is currently completing an encyclopedia of Victorian
            fiction.
Jacques Derrida
         Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within_a_Shell:_Paul_de_Man's_War
         Unable to respond to the questions, to all the questions, I will
            ask myself instead whether responding is possible and what that
            would mean in such a situation. And I will risk in turn several
            questions prior to the definition of a responsibility. But is it
            not an act to assume in theory the concept of a responsibility? Is
            that not already to take a responsibility? One's own as well
            as the responsibility to which one believes one ought to summon
            others?
            The title names a war. Which war?
            Do not think only of the war that broke out several months ago
            around some articles signed by a certain Paul de Man, in Belgium
            between 1940 and 1942. Later you will understand why it is
            important to situate the beginning of things public,that is the
            publications, early in 1940 at the latest, during the war but
            before the occupation of Belgium by the Nazis, and not in December
            1940, the date of the first article that appeared in Le Soir,the
            major Brussels newspaper that was then controlled, more or less
            strictly, by the occupiers. For several months, in the United
            States, the phenomena of this war "around" Pula de Man
            have been limited to newspaper articles. War, a public act, is by
            rights something declared. So we will not count in the category of
            war the private phenomena meetings, discussions,
            correspondences, or telephonic conclaves however intense they
            may have been in recent days, and already well beyond the American
            academic milieu.
             
            Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes
            Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and also teaches at the
            University of California, Irvine. A teacher at Yale for ten years,
            he is the author of Mémoires: for Paul de Man (1986).
            Peggy Kamuf is associate professor of French at Miami University.
            She is the author of Fictions of Feminism Desire: Disclosures of
            Heloise (1982) and Signature Pieces: On the Institution of
            Authorship (forthcoming). Her article "Pieces of
            Resistance" is forthcoming in Reading de Man Reading.
