Enduring Divisions: Critique,Method,and Questions of Value in the Sociology of Literature

The Sociology of Literature

The sociology of literature burgeoned in the late 20th century when scholars in the social sciences and humanities began to explicitly politicise literature and scrutinise its cultural productivity. Existing accounts of the field describe the sociological study of literature, in an interesting contradiction, as both prosperous and fragmented (English, 2010; Laurenson and Swingewood, 1972; Parkhurst Ferguson et al., 1988). The former description can be demonstrated with a brief survey of research into the social elements of literature and literary production over the past century.

As a forerunner to the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, the sociology of literature drew literary critics and sociologists into the same areas of interest, most prominently a Marxist-influenced critique of the cultural canons of Modernity. The height of this crossover was in the 1970s and 1980s, driven by pioneering departments such as the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Essex Sociology of Literature Project, as well as key figures including Stuart Hall (1976, 1980), Raymond Williams (1971, 1973, 1974, 1977, 1981), and Richard Hoggart (1970, 1972). In literary studies, Marxism similarly influenced the scholarship of Pierre Macherey (1978, 1995), Terry Eagleton (1978) and Fredric Jameson (1971, 1981, 1984). These interventions followed in the tradition of texts such as György Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel (1920 [1978]), and Lucien Goldmann’s Towards a Sociology of the Novel (1964 [1975]), but also responded to social events – such as the civil rights movement and second wave feminism – which demanded a more critical approach to cultural texts and their economies of value. Influential works such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), for example, established that literature was instrumental to the cultural power of colonialism and challenged critics to examine the sociological effects of reproducing the canon. In sociology, Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984), a critique of taste and the canons of high art, further popularised sociological interest in the politics of culture. At the same time, the linguistic turn in critical theory and work in anthropology, such as James Clifford and George E. Marcus’ Writing Culture (1986) and Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Culture (1977), examined culture as texts and introduced the vocabulary of rhetoric and composition into the social scientific lexicon. Given this confluence of interest in the social agency of language, the period was rich with intellectual and disciplinary crossovers between sociology and literary studies. ²

These pioneering analyses of the text in context inspired wide-ranging work on the political economies of production, publishing and bibliography (Coser et al., 1985; Escarpit, 1971; Genette, 1997; McGann, 1991; McKenzie, 1984, 1999; Ong, 1982; Sutherland, 1978, 1981, 1988), reading cultures (Fiske, 1989; Griswold, 2000; Hoggart, 1957; Long, 2003; Lowenthal, 1989; Radway, 1984; Stableford, 1987; Tompkins, 1980), and canon formation (Gans, 1999; Graff, 1987; Guillory, 1993; Halle, 1996; Schucking, 1998) across the social sciences and humanities. Empirical studies of literary culture were particularly prominent in the European journal Poetics, with scholars such as Kees van Rees, Hugo Verdaasdonk, and Frank de Glas featured from the 1980s onwards (Schram and Steen, 2001). Quantitative and historiographical studies of literature have also been a feature of the field. Franco Moretti’s geographical and quantitative analyses of literature (1998, 2005), for example, brought social scientific methods to the study of novels, and Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art (1996, see also 1993) marked the literary text, in this case Flaubert, as a document of social history.

Interest in many of these areas persists, with texts such Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo’s Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture (2013) extending the sociology of literature into the growing field of research on the digitisation of reading practices and experiences. Heather Love’s recent writing (2014) on the potential of Erving Goffman’s sociological methods for literary studies also underscores the ongoing richness of interdisciplinary experiments in this area of study. As this brief survey of research demonstrates, the sociology of literature’s reach and influence have been profound. And yet, as a series of special issues of journals devoted to surveying the field at various intervals have all reported, in terms of establishing a clear and cohesive set of methods, the sociology of literature has been consistently affected by different permutations of an enduring cultural divide between the sciences and arts.

A Haunted Field

Special journal issues that examine the sociology of literature’s disciplinary challenges chronicle a history of thwarted efforts; like a curse inherited across generations. Setting this tone in a 1967 special issue of International Social Science Journal, Goldmann, a pioneer of the field, titled his contribution ‘The sociology of literature: Status and problems of method’ (Goldman, 1967: 493). In 1972 these problems persisted, as Diana Laurenson and Alan Swingewood, in their primer The Sociology of Literature, claimed ‘the sociological study of literature has not developed, either in terms of its theory or in its methods of analysis, but has remained in some kind of limbo, suspended between literature as literature and sociology as social science’ (p. vii). On one side, they explained, there are ‘those who believe that social science is simply the study of facts’, and on the other, ‘those for whom literature is a unique subjective experience which defies scientific analysis’ (Laurenson and Swingewood, 1972: vii).

Writing about the field in 1970, sociologist Roger Pincott similarly argued that long-standing assumptions about the autonomy of art from political culpability or analysis trivialise the sociology of literature’s aims. He explains:

There is something about the so-called sociology of literature which often produces that wry and knowing smile or that scornful snort which is tantamount to a charge of dilettantism […] and this, coupled with the reciprocal fear that a massive violation of aesthetic sensibilities will automatically ensue from attempts to locate the social determinants of great literature, often inhibits people from practising it or from taking seriously those who do. (Pincott, 1970: 177)

More contemporary contributions, such as Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Philippe Desan, and Wendy Griswold’s work (1988), claim that it remains impossible, in this enduringly prohibitive intellectual environment, to collate the sociological study of literature into a coherent identity. ‘The sociology of literature’, they declare, ‘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’ (Parkhurst Ferguson et al., 1988: 421, see also Griswold, 1993).

Shifting forward another 22 years, James F. English’s 2010 ‘Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After “the Sociology of Literature”’ also presents a scattered terrain. He orients his introductory essay to New Literary History’s special issue by stating that: ‘The “sociology of literature” has always named a polyglot and rather incoherent set of enterprises. It is scattered across so many separate domains … that it scarcely even rates the designation of a “field”’ (p. v). In this long-running disciplinary biography the sociology of literature cannot be gathered to form a coherent body of work. Collectively, these attempts to revive, and often defend, the sociology of literature describe a censorship that, arising from an engrained disciplinary division of labour, continues to challenge the progression of a truly interdisciplinary project. The persistence of this unusual state across almost 50 years summons the desire for an explanation: what is it that keeps the sociological study of literature dispersed?

According to these existing studies, the sociology of literature maintains a precarious position in the academy because the academic institution is built around the division of the sciences and arts – C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ (1959 [1998]). As Parkhurst Ferguson et al. explain, the ‘most basic boundary line divides literary studies and social science’ and this ‘fundamental opposition between the two determines work in the sociology of literature more than might be supposed for such avowedly interdisciplinary work’ (1988: 421). However, reading English’s most recent proposal draws out another aspect of the ongoing disciplinary irresolution within the sociology of literature, that is, a question about how, and by whom, this division is actually authored.

Like the disciplinary audits that precede his, English aims to recognise the interdependent insights of sociology and literary studies and to remedy the ‘image problem’ that seems to overshadow the sociology of literature (2010: vi). But to realise this aim, as previously stated, he takes a slightly different approach to preceding interventions. English’s proposal turns from the sociological legacy of ideology critique to invest in new endeavours, namely, the alternative methods being posed in opposition to critique across the social sciences and humanities, such as flat and descriptive reading or Latour-inspired analyses of networks. However, as this article will argue, rather than straightforwardly alleviating cultural divisions, this turn continues to participate in intellectual and institutional conflicts about the politics and propriety of form.

English aims to open a pragmatic and inclusive field, and to openly address the cultural agonism that persists within the sociology of literature. However, offering the potential of new methods as an answer to the exhaustion of critical methods risks reinstating the kind of methodological division that English hopes to challenge. The stereotype of critique as rigid, out-dated, and obsessed with the revelation of false consciousness, is no less generalised than the idea of science as all facts and literature as all fictions. Thus to achieve the pragmatic and inclusive field that English aims to set out, I argue that it is important to consider and include the value of critique as a method that has facilitated and continues to facilitate sociological inquiry into the values and ethics of cultural production. To truly address a division between sociology and literature, might it be possible to recognise the value of sociological forms of critical inquiry not as methods of reading or analysis to work against, but instead as methods that are sociologically dynamic, aesthetically flexible, and open to change and potential?

Recurring Logics? The Sociology of Literature Now

In ‘Everywhere and Nowhere’ English (2010) takes up the question of why the sociology of literature has been derailed in the mainstream academy. He offers a detailed history and comprehensive survey of the field, but also reports that despite the richness of past and present research, ‘the sociology of literature’ remains a stigmatised term. Mapping the contemporary corporate university, English explains that the professional stereotyping with which C.P. Snow charged ‘men of science’ and ‘men of letters’ still thrives in the academy.

In this bleak landscape, literary studies’ conception of sociology maligns the sociologist’s project as akin to, if not in cahoots with, the economic quantification, restructuring, and retrenchment of intellectual work in the humanities. English cautions that ‘literary scholars seem less able than ever to map themselves on the higher-educational landscape without reference to that presumed fault line’ between social science and the humanities (2010: xiii, xiv–xv). This familiar disciplinary contest continues to structure and challenge English’s efforts to establish a more inclusive, pragmatic field. In staking out a position for his argument, for instance, English is faced with the need to limit his scope. In this first necessary choice, the two cultures already weigh upon English’s attempt to rethink them, as he limits his focus to ‘the fate of sociology in the recent history of literary studies … for purposes of clarity and simplicity’ (p. v). This choice displays the institutional pressure to make an argument intelligible within a certain specialist field. An article cannot be written without some degree of omission and generalisation, but in this particular instance, such disciplinary narrowing is exactly the pressure that English hopes to address, and yet cannot quite escape.

The logic of both the challenges to, and recuperations of, disciplinary value within English’s text is complex and its formulation deserves close attention. In opening, English maintains a balanced position to counter literary studies’ pejorative view of social science. He explains the ‘party line’ as a bystander, describing how sociology’s role in the humanities oscillates between that of a relic and an antagonist:

New or old, the sociology of literature seems to possess little traction in literary studies. Nobody appears to regret the passing of an ‘old’ sociology of literature, invoked these days (where it is invoked at all) as a stale and outmoded approach …. But nor would many literary scholars embrace the prospect ... of a new sociological turn, of a more ‘sociological’ future for literary studies. If the old sociology of literature seems all too old, ... a new sociology of literature can seem all too contemporary, in step with ominous trends that are driving humanistic inquiry toward some small, sad corner of the increasingly social-science-dominated academy to endure an ‘interdisciplinary’ afterlife of collaborative media research. (English, 2010: v)

English is aware that this characterisation of social science as a quantitative epidemic is both inaccurate and unfounded. But he is sensitive to the brutal economic conditions that he argues have led humanities scholars to create a faulty, but identity-shoring, causal link between social scientists and the number-crunching statisticians of their increasingly corporatised universities (English, 2010: vii). English offers a more detailed explanation of this reasoning:

The institutions in which we are lodged … have become ever more committed to numerical data, imposing on us ever more stringent quantificational regimes of value and assessment … As the largest discipline in the humanities, and the center of its interdisciplinary formations, literary studies has shouldered much of the burden of critique and resistance to this encroachment, defending qualitative models and strategies against the naïve or cynical quantitative paradigm that has become the doxa of higher-educational management. Under these institutional circumstances, antagonism toward counting has begun to feel like an urgent struggle for survival. (English, 2010: vii–viii)

This assessment of literary studies’ political position describes a discipline unaware not only of the actual work done in sociology – much of it liberal, theoretical, and qualitative – but importantly, also literary studies’ own indebtedness to social science for the political and social theories it has relied upon to shoulder ‘the burden of critique and resistance’ (pp. vii–viii).

It is therefore a welcome relief when English, maintaining his position on the border of both disciplines, qualifies this caricature of sociology later in the article. He acknowledges that ‘[c]ritical sociology has contributed far more than literary studies to the tool kit for critique of current social hierarchies and neoliberal ideologies’ (p. xiii). English locates a tension point here between representation and reality; between a narrative that is verifiable and one that is embraced because it explains something uncertain, provides a clear enemy, or holds a group together. The process by which social facts gain momentum and become socially verified, despite a lack of evidence or logic, occurs even in the very social sphere that is charged with the duty of discerning them. Correlation, however loose, is taken as causation. It is the robustness of this ‘view of sociology, and of the social sciences in general, as allied with the hegemony of numbers, and as a discipline decisively favored, over and against the humanities, by the despised new managers of higher education’ (p. xiii) – a contemporary expression of the two cultures – that English initially struggles against in his efforts to address the disjuncture between literary studies’ representation of social science and what he sees to be the reality.

Given that this is the method English uses, namely, to point out a social fact which he then proves to be unfounded despite its social purchase, one could say that his argument is a traditional ideology critique. Furthermore, we could assume that it is explicitly Marxist in nature. English pinpoints the economic conditions, specifically inequality and the rationalisation of the individual as a unit of labour, as the cause of literary studies’ inaccurate but robust representation of social scientists as corporate statisticians and the sociology of literature as a managerial effort to make the humanities nothing more than a subset of social science. Indeed, if it were not for the next shift in English’s argument, we could read his discussion thus far as a reason to pause and reconsider the current turn against ideology critique. For this turn, as English explains here, rests on ideological assumptions, and therefore for this same movement to claim that ideology critique is no longer relevant or necessary is a paradoxical act. Such a paradox might highlight the need to protect the space of critique within our own methods, which are themselves embedded in and geared by all kinds of fluid and contested social discourses. English’s argument, up to this point, could serve overall as a check on how important our power to check each other as scholars remains.

It is surprising then, given this preceding argument, that English endorses ‘the especially rich potential’ of a turn from critique as a next move for the sociology of literature (2010: xii). This provocation is doubled when the definition of critique emerges as that which is most sociological in the sociology of literature – the so-called ‘skeptical criticism’ that Paisley Livingston has termed ‘the sociological turn in literary theory’ (1988: 5). This shift seems odd not only because of English’s own use of critique and his interjections about the value of sociology. At an earlier point in the article, as part of his historical overview, English also explicitly and compellingly argues that it is partially under the banner of cultural critique that the sociology of literature has been successfully operating, and indeed gaining a significant foothold, across the social sciences and humanities. The development of Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, queer, and new historicist frameworks for analysing literature dragged novels, poems, and other texts out of New Criticism’s asocial aesthetics to investigate their social productivity, their intentions and affects. Literary criticism in this case continued, as Wolf Lepenies notes of earlier styles, as ‘a concealed sociology’ (1988: 174). English singles out many key interventions in these fields of critical, cultural sociology as effective ‘sociologies of literature’, for example, Gauri Viswanathan’s educational sociology, which English explains was important to post-colonial studies and the recognition of colonial agendas at work in modern literary studies. (English, 2010: x). Similarly, he credits the immense influence of Bourdieu’s study of cultural value and canon formation, a foundational critique of cultural ideology (p. ix).

Indeed, we begin to see the vital role critical reading played in establishing the sociological study of literature as a popular and valid practice. Initially the project thrives: ‘There was rather less need to specify a distinct school or approach called the “sociology of literature”’, English explains, ‘because so many literary scholars were now, in this very basic sense of the term, sociologists of literature’ (2010: viii). He summarises:

Wherever [critical theorists] might be located on the map of named and recognized subfields—postcolonial studies, queer theory, new historicism—their shared disciplinary mission was to coordinate the literary with the social: to provide an account of literary texts and practices by reference to the social forces of their production, the social meanings of their formal particulars, and the social effects of their circulation and reception. (p. viii)

Here English states that, in critiquing cultural production, literary scholars and social scientists created a sociology of literature more encompassing even than that of literary Marxism. The critical sociology of literature approached the literary text for the social meaning of its formal elements, not just the economic or social conditions of its production. The division between text and context was not honoured. Literature was recognised as a sociological actor in its own right, but crucially, one with its own semiotic and aesthetic particularities.

However, when English comes to conclude this summary of all the projects that have operated as sociologies of literature during times when it was assumed the field had disappeared, the determinants of his argument curiously shift. There is a leap from the success of critique as one of these ‘stealthily advancing’ unions of social and literary matter, towards not only the presumed diagnosis of critique’s exhaustion, but also to the positioning of it as the obstacle that has held sociology and literary studies apart. This shift occurs in the space of just three sentences:

[W]hatever its reputational and nomenclatural fates may have been since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the sociology of literature has not actually receded … It has stealthily advanced on many fronts and seems now, as much of the work in this issue suggests, to be arriving at a point of especially rich potential as both sociology and literary studies turn toward new, more rigorously ‘descriptive’ or ‘pragmatic’ approaches, rejecting the long-dominant paradigm of critique that has governed and limited the previous history of their encounters. (English, 2010: xii)

Here, English’s argument ceases being a celebration of the branches of the sociology of literature that have continued to thrive in the face of prohibitive conditions, such as reader-response research, economic studies of the publishing industry, political analyses of how literary canons are chosen, and many forms of social critique. In the space of these few sentences, English shifts to celebrating new methods, which are (often without ethical questioning) leveraged against a critical method that, by English’s own account, forged the sociology of literature. Where he sets out to question the rift between sociology and literary studies, originally represented as a division between the social sciences and the humanities, English begins to re-anchor the division, setting up critique as the antagonist to ‘new approaches’.

What is lost in this detour toward the presumed vitality of new methods is focused attention on the problem that propels English’s project to begin with, namely, what is at stake in the intellectual rift between sociology and literature? Reinstating a new version of this oppositional structure limits the potential to rethink what makes something real or factual across disciplinary lines. If we begin with the analytic premise that the texture of a particular iteration must be critical or creative, detecting or describing, sceptical or pragmatic, then we preclude the recognition of forms of cultural experience that draw their authority from a tangle of these perspectives. A truly pragmatic approach to methods would require that such divisions not be maintained. The political implications of deriding a position of critique are equally troubling, particularly given the contemporary economic and political conditions that English cites. The political power of narrative and the skills required to address it are as relevant now as ever. Underlining this conflict, political economist Wanda Vrasti (2011) has pointed out parallels between the so-called affective turn’s celebration of creativity and autonomy and the current neo-liberal celebration of creative entrepreneurism, which is, in reality, a celebration of the mass casualisation of the workforce. In this context, the kind of dismissal of critique in favour of performative and poetic genres that we see in the work of social scientists like Nigel Thrift (2007) resonates with what Vrasti sees as the ‘moral legitimating structures’ that capitalism relies upon to ‘make critique look ridiculous or exasperating’ (Vrasti, 2011: 1). Rejecting the value of ideology critique in sociology, we are left with a scholarship that risks disabling the value of critique as a means of social intervention. Nonetheless, English’s assessment of the sociology of literature reflects a broader turn against critique; one that is gaining considerable traction across the social sciences and humanities.

The Turn Against Critique

In recent years, several theorists have variously proposed that to be ‘generous’, scholars we must discard methods of close reading, judgement, and investments in unearthing hidden truths, to take up new, often affect-oriented, experimental practices. It is difficult to collect these theorists into a common group, for they are often in implicit and open conflict and have different allegiances and aims. Some of these proposals fit within what has been termed the ‘affective turn’, while others do not. Nonetheless a common thread can be followed through several of these methodological treatises. Arising within a shared timeframe, the proposals are united by an insistence that we have been failed by past methods, specifically critical reading practices, and must forge more creative ways to tease out the nuances between facts and values, professional and personal investments, and material and ethical concerns.

In affect theory, for instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick champions ‘reparative reading’ over ‘paranoid reading’ (1997), which Lauren Berlant has termed her ‘antidote to the hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Berlant, 2011: 122–123). Brian Massumi argues for a turn away from critique’s judgment to affect’s potential (1995, see also Zournazi, 2002). Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’ (2009), offers ‘surface reading’ as an answer to Louis Althusser’s ‘symptomatic’, deep reading. Rita Felski argues for a ‘neo-phenomenology’ to remedy the suspicion of ideology critique (2008). Other methodological manifestos, including Nigel Thrift’s Non-Representational Theory (2007), Michael Warner’s ‘uncritical reading’ (2004), Rachael Ablow’s ‘affective reading’ (2010), John Law’s ‘mess as method’ (2004), and ‘fictocriticism’ (Muecke, 2002, 2010; Stewart, 2007; Taussig, 2010) also call for alternatives to critique that they variously argue are more creative, positive, and engaged with the real stuff of life.

All of these methodological proposals share a conversion structure, seeking to make up for the ethical and explanatory failings of critical methods with novel forms of inquiry. They proffer methodological remedies to critique, which is thought to be too brutal in its diagnoses of false consciousness. Instead they turn to the potential of new methods that, though often opaquely defined, promise not to nay-say or demystify everyday attachments. But such generosity does not extend towards existing methods within such proposals; the acuity of new methods is often leveraged with reference to the blind spots of others. In ‘Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism’ (2010), for instance, Timothy Bewes proposes his own notion of ‘reading with the grain’ as an antidote to Walter Benjamin’s suspicious ‘reading against the grain’. Bewes underlines ‘the need to out grow our supposedly Benjaminian habits of reading against the grain—the phrase that functioned as a byword for theoretically informed criticism in the second half of the twentieth century’ (2010: 4). He contends that ‘in its place would appear a reading that suspends judgment, that commits itself, rather, to the most generous reading possible’ (p. 4).

Ironically, in this effort to be generous, many precedents, methods, projects, questions, and interpretive possibilities, are needlessly set aside. Bruno Latour, for example, a social scientist who has consistently worked with the question of how facts are premised, has made two recent attempts to depart from critical methods, on the proviso that they cannot register the value of facts. Firstly, in ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’ (2004), he opposes the iconoclastic methods of critique to a more generous treatment of matters of concern as socially productive, rather than simply constructed. Translating this shift into a method, in ‘An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto’ (2010), Latour sets out ‘compositionism’ as an alternative to what he sees to be deconstruction’s ‘destructive’ methods. Though they are diverse, implicit in several of the contributions listed above, such as those by Best and Marcus and Felski, is the assumption that critical or structural hermeneutics, including sociological readings of culture, cannot facilitate an engagement with how social values come to verify facts, how facts come to verify social values, and the complication and entanglement of these processes. However, it is important to note that the efforts of social scientists, such as Latour, to engage with the question of why certain things gain truth-value or currency, are premised upon a rich history of sociological inquiry.

According to scholars advocating new methods, the problem is critique’s privileging of verifiable facts over constitutive fictions, based on what they argue is social science’s method of pinpointing the constructed basis of social fact. However, it seems important to consider that this may be a reductive characterisation of social science’s project and history. Sociology has long dealt with questions of how social structures and subjectivities can be actualised by projections and desires. From Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism (Marx and Engels, 1867) and Emile Durkheim’s concept of social facts (1895 [1982]), to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power (1984) and Robert K. Merton’s idea of self-fulfilling prophesies (1968) the discipline has explored the productive power and social gravity of felt facts. In 1928, the sociologists W.I. Thomas and D.S. Thomas, also formulated their famous ‘Thomas theorem’ – ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ – in an effort to understand the precarious productivity of belief (pp. 571–572). As these studies demonstrate, the sociological pursuit of facticity is not simply about exposing the falseness of false consciousness, but to consider its social productivity and potential. In sociology’s study of cultural production, aesthetics and pragmatics are entangled. Georg Simmel’s study of the everyday, sensory experience of living in a modern, urban economy in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1971), and Bourdieu’s theorisation of taste (1984), with its description of the realising, stratifying effects of cultural and aesthetic preferences, are two examples of this crossover.

Similarly, deconstruction is not purely destructive, but aims to wrest possibilities of meaning from open texts. Though often contrary, Jacques Derrida does not simply declare that reading Rousseau is a waste of time, nor does Paul de Man dismiss the entire project of Romanticism. These are not dismissive pursuits. Their readings deal closely and reparatively, though not uncritically, with past works. If we pursue Latour’s project to open up which actors contribute to and animate life, or English’s desire to encourage a pragmatic field, surely such historical precedents – even their suspicion, judgement, and criticality – must remain part of the puzzle? What might we learn from previous struggles to navigate the inextricability of facts and values? Do all attachments call for reparation? To be generous, must scholars be uncritical, or has being decisive, or even incisive, also been a form of care?

If we unpack past attempts to tease out the nature of social facts, we might discover that the problems they contain are inherent to all efforts to discern what is productive or true. However, several arguments against critique frame both structural and post-structural approaches to experiential truth as uniquely and irreparably flawed. Latour, for instance, argues that critique has made a career out of denouncing the efficacy of people’s values. He asserts that critique’s limited narratives always give the critic the upper hand in unveiling the illusory fetishes of the ‘naïve believer’ (Latour, 2004: 238) and have ‘had the immense drawback of creating a massive gap between what was felt and what was real’ (2010: 4). Though it clashes with his continued participation in this method, Latour diagnoses faith in de-mystification as bad scholarship, and calls for ‘a suspension of the critical impulse’ in order to ‘repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together’ (2010: 4). In ‘After Suspicion’ (2009), Rita Felski similarly argues that ‘suspicion’, a term she uses to characterise critique, ‘sustains and reproduces itself in a reflexive distrust of common knowledge and an emphasis on the chasm that separates scholarly and lay interpretation’ (p. 29). It is, she suggests, a method from which we must ‘turn’ if we are to ‘build bridges between theory and common-sense, between academic criticism and ordinary reading’ (p. 31). While arguments such as these hope to open up a pragmatic, plural, and generously inclusive practice, they often overlook the implicit recuperation of disciplinary stereotypes and boundaries. The concerns of critical sociology become unnecessarily devalued as the potential of structural and deconstructive analysis is set aside. In this conception of scholarly practice, the division between the ‘two cultures’ is revived: subjective experience, and our ability to account for it, are opposed to critical reading, which is considered to be too caught up in exposing hidden evidence or diagnosing delusion to be able to engage with the productive affects and attachments of life.

Questions of Identity

However, delving into the history of the ‘two cultures’, the identity of the critical sociologist remains far less settled. Indeed, Wolf Lepenies suggests that the formative rift between sociology and literature came not from innate differences between them but from an uncomfortable overlap (1988: 13). ‘In this competition over the claim to be the rule of life appropriate to industrial society,’ Lepenies cautions, ‘sociology cannot... simply be equated with rationality and literature with feeling’ (1988: 13). Similarly defending sociology against accusations of ‘vulgar scientism’ in a way that speaks to the current controversies, Robert Nisbet explains that, in addition to canonical sociologists’ commitment to the intricate literacy of social life, their methods were also a melange of scientific and poetic modes. ‘Can anyone believe that Tӧnnies’ typology of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Weber’s vision of rationalization, Simmel’s image of metropolis, and Durkheim’s perspective of anomie came from logico-empirical analysis as it is understood today? Merely to ask the question’, Nisbet states, ‘is to know the answer’ (1966: 19). Nisbet argues that a scholar who claims that sociology, and specifically the study and critique of social ideologies, stands squarely in a tradition of arid rationality misses the fact that ‘[e]ach [of these sociologists] was, with deep intuition, with profound imaginative grasp, reacting to the world around him, even as does the artist, and, also like the artist, objectifying internal and only partly conscious states of mind’ (1996: 19). Sociology, in this history, is not firmly settled in the house of science, but rather, has long been a challenge to the two cultures’ supposed propriety.

Sociology embodies the fact that the laws of separation by which knowledge is reproduced – chiefly the separation of reason and emotion, or fable and fact – are elastic. Genuinely opening up the question of sociology’s disciplinary identity, we might begin to rethink the exclusions of the current approach to the ‘two cultures’, not by turning away from history to take up new reparative modes, but to reparatively return to the history of the ‘two cultures’. While critique has recently been used as a fixed and proper noun to denote an exhausted method, is it possible that the sociological, political, and ethical concerns that have driven ideology critique are being overlooked or undervalued? To ask this question is to engage with a division which may not be as pure, and thus lend as solid a ground for leverage, as we might assume. There is a common history that speaks of the social sciences and humanities as disciplinary opponents, but, as Livingston notes, ‘dichotomies drawn in such schemes are far too tidy to be trusted’ (1988: 1).

My analysis of current shifts in the sociology of literature hopes to reframe recent methodological manifestos not as radical departures, but as the continuation of a debate about disciplines, methods, ethics, and the nature of veracity. The current negotiations with disciplinary propriety offer a rich ground to rethink what is at stake in the intellectual and institutional opposition of the social sciences’ and humanities’ attempts to document social life – a division, as the sociology of literature affirms, that can never be final. Following Livingston, we might consider that the more recent divide – between a caricatured version of critique and methods that are presumed to be more accommodating of affect, change, or potential – obscures the complexity and crossover of these methods and their histories. Sociology has never settled on one side of the two cultures divide, and therefore an oppositional structure, be it between science and art, structuralism and pragmatism, or critique and creativity, cannot capture the richness of its disciplinary history, identity, and endeavours.

English’s initial query, namely why questions that fall between the disciplines of sociology and literature are so difficult to ask and have heard, cannot be answered by proving one method to be better than another. The question is about method itself: why does this oppositional structure recur, albeit in different guises, and what is at stake in it? Furthermore, how might we address the common hermeneutic drives of sociology, literature, and literary studies, each involving reflexive acts which strive for authentic representation whilst also struggling with the question of what an authentic representation is? Rather than seeking the promise of new methods, therefore, we might consider how existing methods, upon closer inspection, might already confound the long-standing division of the literary and the social and its correlative hierarchies of truth-value. As the sociological analyses of academic methods addressed in this article suggest, the two cultures is not simply a static, imposed structure but one which is constantly revised and reaffirmed on the basis of changing, and often unseen, investments by the very scholars it affects.