It is argued that relations between the discourses of sociology and literature need to be rethought outside the appropriative, yet in appropriate, terms of 'the sociology of ...'. The work of Foucault, and particularly his location of the joint emergence of literature and the human sciences at a single 'moment', are enlisted towards this end. While the human sciences are seen to rely, broadly, on a number of fictional postulates and categories, literature can also be seen as a source of serious and advanced social theory. To illustrate this second point, the article concludes with a preliminary analysis of the baptism passage from Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Althusser, L. and E. Balibar (1970), Reading Capital, London , New Left Books.
2.
Barthes, R. (1977a), 'The death of the author' in Image-Music-Text, trans. S. Heath, London , Fontana, 142-8.
3.
Barthes, R. (1977b), 'Writers, intellectuals, teachers' in Image-Nlusic-Text, trans. S. Heath, London , Fontana, 190-215.
4.
Berger, P.L. and B. Berger (1979), Sociology: A Biographical Approach , Harmondsworth, Peregrine.
5.
Bertaux, D. (ed.) (1981), Biography and Society: The Life History Approach to the Social Sciences, Beverley Hills, Calif., Sage.
6.
Blum, A. and P. McHugh (1984), Self-reflection in the Arts and Sciences , Atlantic Highlands, NJ., Humanities Press.
7.
Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
8.
Burns, E. and T. Burns (eds) (1973), Sociology of Literature and Drama, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
9.
Clifford, J. and G. Marcus (eds) (1986), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press.
10.
Connerton, P. (1976), 'Introduction' in Critical Sociology , Harmondsworth, Penguin, 11-39.
11.
Derrida, J. (1976), Of Grammatology, Baltimore , Johns Hopkins University Press.
12.
Eagleton, T. (1976a), Marxism and Literary Criticism, London, Methuen.
13.
Eagleton, T. (1976b), Criticism and Ideology, London, New Left Books.
14.
Foucault, M. (1970), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London, Tavistock .
15.
Foucault, M. (1977a), 'What is an author?' in Language, Counter-memory Practice, trans. D. Bouchard, Oxford, Blackwell, 113-38.
16.
Foucault, M. (1977b), 'Language to infinity' in Language, Counter-memory Practice, trans. D. Bouchard, Oxford, Blackwell, 53-67.
17.
Freud, S. (1976) 'The primary and secondary processes — repression' in A. Richards (ed.), The Interpretation of Dreams , VII (E), Harmondsworth, Pelican, 745-69.
18.
Frow, J. (1987), Legal fictions/legal practice, unpublished paper presented at the 'Moving the Boundaries' Seminars, Murdoch University, April, 1987.
19.
Garfinkel, H. (1967), Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ., Prentice-Hall.
20.
Giddens, A. (1982), 'Action, structure, power' in Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory, London, Macmillan, 28-39.
21.
Goldmann, L. (1975) Towards a Sociology of the Novel, London, Tavistock.
22.
Goldmann, L. (1977), Cultural Creation in Modern Society , Oxford, Blackwell.
23.
Habermas, J. (1970), 'On systematically distorted communication', Inquiry, 13, 205-18.
24.
Habermas, J. (1972), Knowledge and Human Interests , trans. J. Shapiro, London, Heinemann .
25.
Johnson, B.S. (1973), Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? , London, Hutchinson.
26.
Laurenson, D. and A. Swingewood (1972), The Sociology of Literature, London, Paladin.
27.
Macherey, P. (1978), A Theory of Literary Production, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
28.
Marx, K. (1939), The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal, London, Lawrence and Wishart .
29.
McHoul, A.W. (in press), 'An initial investigation of the usability of fictional conversation for doing conversation analysis', Semiotica .
30.
Nietzsche, F. (1971), 'The wanderer and his shadow', final sequel to Human, All Too Human, added 1880, in W. Kaufmann (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche, London, Chatto and Windus, 68-75.
31.
Nietzsche, F. (1973/1886), Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans, R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin .
32.
Peake, M. (1985/1946), Titus Groan, London, Methuen.
33.
Williams, R. (1983), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Sociey , London, Flamingo.
34.
Williamson, D. (1985), Authorship & Criticism, Sydney, Local Consumption, Occasional Papers Series, 7.
35.
Willis, P. (1977), Learning to Labour : How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, Farnborough, Saxon House.
