Social Theorizing through Literary Fiction. Social Aesthetics and The Man Without Qualities

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F68378068%3A_____%2F25%3A00619374" target="_blank" >RIV/68378068:_____/25:00619374 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-46348-9_2" target="_blank" >http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-46348-9_2</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-46348-9_2" target="_blank" >10.1007/978-3-658-46348-9_2</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Social Theorizing through Literary Fiction. Social Aesthetics and The Man Without Qualities

Original language description

I build on Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (MwQ), the „Soziologische Aesthetik” of Georg Simmel, and Arnold Berleant’s social aesthetics to propose a model for theorizing social phenomena through literary fiction. The „aesthetic totality” of literary texts comes into being through a unique reading experience in the sense of Simmel’s „relational emergence.” Unlike classical emergentism in sociology, Simmel’s non-hierarchical and non-causal approach implies that the emergent entities depend on a singular constellation of relations but also sediment into more durable forms. The aesthetic totality thus consists of the dynamic interplay between the actors’ bodies and environments as well as collective representations and cultural structures. I argue for a dialogue with literary works via literature’s own means of communication as a viable alternative to theorizing social phenomena especially when it comes to their nondiscursive, emotional, and existential dimensions. As an example, I propose a dialogue with MwQ to theorize the so-called „nondeclarative culture” that recently took by storm some of the leading Western sociological journals. Instead of positing factors of social action inside human bodies as neurocognitive science suggests, or in collective representations proposed by Durkheimian cultural sociology, Musil’s seminal novel allows us to elaborate what Simmel called Stimmung—the mood. Through its aesthetic form, MwQ channels the mood without its explicit and discursively fixed definition, thus rendering what we might call social theorizing in „happening.”

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60206 - Specific literatures

Project

<a href="/en/project/GM24-12400M" target="_blank" >GM24-12400M: The Sociology of Literature Revisited: Towards Epistemological Symmetry within Literature-and-Society Research</a><br>

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Zwischen Wirklichkeits-und Möglichkeitssinn: Robert Musil literatursoziologisch betrachtet

ISBN

978-3-658-46347-2

Number of pages of the result

25

Pages from-to

23-47

Number of pages of the book

216

Publisher name

Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

Place of publication

Wiesbaden

UT code for WoS chapter

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