Abstract
With few exceptions, sociologists have seldom tried to illustrate the discipline’s principal concepts and tendencies by connecting it with literary or philosophical sources. Fifty years ago the venerable Lewis A. Coser edited Sociology Through Literature: An Introductory Reader (Prentice-Hall 1963) which was successful enough to warrant a second edition in 1972, fully 517 pages in length. It is hard to imagine such a book selling that well nowadays, which says more about the shrinking of the sociological imagination than about the quality of Coser’s selections, and their durability over time.
Since there is no such reader on the market today, it is to Praeger’s credit that it has issued a book that tries to do something similar, yet differently. Christofer Edling (Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany) and Jens Rydgren (Stockholm University, Sweden) write that “The idea for this project came to us on a beautiful spring day in Florence several years ago. It was the focus of a light dinner conversation which later that same evening evolved into a fantasy multi-volume encyclopedia, spanning the history of humankind from Aristotle to Zola” (p. ix). Shortly thereafter they allude briefly to Coser’s book and a few others that have spoken to the obvious sociological content of “Literature,” and bemoan the fact that this relationship has not been more thoroughly examined since its brief spell of enthusiastic participants some decades ago. That their book is fairly expensive, only available in cloth, and has not sold terribly well according to Amazon’s ranking, is the result of the book’s inapplicability to regular coursework in sociology departments, and not a fair estimate of the book’s intellectual or pedagogical merit.
Edling and Rydgren’s innovation was to sidestep the Coserian approach, allowing excerpts from Literature to illuminate sociological topics in their inimitable way. Instead, they asked a large group of established sociologists to write about works of their own choosing which revealed sociological truths which might not be available elsewhere, or in such palatable form. Their success at corralling talented scholars gives the book its surprising charm. Without repeating the Table of Contents, consider what you might learn from Hiroshi Ono on Shakespeare, Guillermina Jasso on Plato, Joachim Savelsberg on Kafka, Jens Rydgren on Proust, Wendy Griswold on Achebe, Karen Cerulo and Janet Ruane on Pearl Buck, Peter Bearman on Dante, Thomas Fararo on Whitehead, Barry Markovsky on Vonnegut, Gary Alan Fine on Swift, Ronald Breiger on Spinoza, David Willer on Bertrand Russell, John Levi Martin on Kant, Richard Swedberg on Peirce, or Omar Lizardo on Piaget. There are other chapters which treat Orwell, Robert Musil, Strindberg, Ibsen, Cassirer, Cicero, Darwin, Rabelais, Zola, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Galileo, Borges, Asimov, Isaiah Berlin, Dewey, and Hobbes.
If the book is not as successful as one might wish it to be, the reason is the brevity of each chapter. While it is fun to read, for instance, Breiger on Spinoza, one realizes that seven pages of text does not reveal enough of either. Seven pages of Gary Alan Fine on Swift is just enough to get going. In order to cover 32 authors in the allotted space, the editors likely held their contributors to strict limits, so that when one reads a very brief essay about someone like Musil or Proust, beloved and longwinded as they were, the merest hint of greatness makes its way through the text. Still, even if a few (graduate?) students learn about the book and are inspired by its snappy chapters to read beyond their comprehensive exam lists, it will have achieved a noble end.