Posts in category: Sociological Bandwagon

Pierre Bourdieu, pioneer of quantitative literary analysis:

Pour vérifier la correspondance entre l’espace des positions et l’espace des prises de position, nous avons recensé 537 textes de 510 auteurs publiés par les éditeurs retenus dans notre étude, qui ont été traduits en français entre juillet 1995 et juillet 1996 et retenu, pour chacun des titres, les variables suivantes : genre (roman, nouvelle, récit, conte), éditeur d’origine et et d’arrivée, langue d’origine (pour l’anglais on a distingué entre «anglais» et «américain»), nom du traducteur, nom et sexe de l’auteur, année de parution de l’édition originale, de la traduction française (1995 ou 1996), jugements de la critique, prix, nombre de pages, nombre total d’auteurs étrangers publiées par l’éditeur concerné, nombre d’auteurs ayant la même langue d’origine nationale. L’immensité des recherches nécessaires pour le mener à bien nous a conduits à abandonner ce projet.

In order to verify the correspondence between the space of positions and the space of position-takings, we took a census [survey?] of 537 texts by 510 authors translated into French between July 1995 and July 1996 which were published by the publishers in our study, considering the following variables: genre (roman, nouvelle, récit, conte [novel, short story, (non-fiction) narrative, (fantastic) tale]), original publisher and French publisher, original language (for English we distinguished between “English” and “American”), name of translator, name and sex of the author, year of publication of the original edition, of the French translation (1995 or 1996), critics’ judgments, prizes, number of pages, total number of foreign authors published by the publisher in question, number of authors having the same original national language. The immensity of the research necessary to carry this project off led us to abandon it.

("Une révolution conservatrice dans l’édition," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 126, no. 1 [1999]: 3–28; here 18n31.)

Nothing beside remains….

(thanks to @rania_tn on twitter for help translating genre terms; I alone am responsible for errors in translation above)

If we want to do sociology of literature, let’s get away from texts for a bit.

One of the most promising things about the current interest in quantitative methods for literary study is that it offers us some alternatives to reading as a method. There are important questions about literature—above all, about literature as a social and historical system—that cannot be answered with the tools of the expert textual interpreter. Such questions are better answered, I believe, in closer collaboration with our disciplinary kindred in the social sciences.

Thanks to a new special issue of Cultural Sociology focused on literature, we have a chance to look at some concerete examples of what sociological approaches to literary problems currently look like. In this post I’ll discuss the excellent essay there by Gisèle Sapiro, Translation and Symbolic Capital in the Era of Globalization: French Literature in the United States. Sapiro, whose work I have been following for a while, works in the tradition of the sociology of fields, and has written on both twentieth-century literary history and contemporary world literature. This latest essay is particularly fun to think with, because I have my greedy paws on some of the same data Sapiro uses, so it will be possible to look in some detail at the sort of evidence and the sort of analysis her approach entails—and, perhaps, to think how to extend it.

Here are some tentative notes on methodological problems in quantitative approaches to literary history that I’ve been worrying over. I’m moved to post these because of two great discussions of quantitative literary studies by sociologists, a review by Ben Merriman of recent work by Franco Moretti and Matt Jockers, and a blog post by Tressie McMillan Cottom on quantitative text analysis across the disciplines. Monomaniacal proselytizer for closer relations between sociology and literary study that I am, first I say: go read those! They’re really great! Also, I’m leaping onto this bandwagon. Mostly I want to indicate how this very useful pressure from sociologists might help literary scholarship to refine its methods and clarify its research program. I’m afraid this is all very drafty, in the form of broad assertions with basically no citations. Blogging!

I recently returned from the DH 2014 conference in Lausanne. I went to give my brief (my brief brief) for getting serious about social science methods in digital humanities under the title “Let DH Be Sociological!” The conference offered plenty to think about on this theme. Also I got accused of wanting to “dumb down” an entire field of study…so that’s got me thinking too.