Sociological Methods: Institutional Construction of Literature across Time

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel revisits the idea of “sociology of literature” and examines its relevance to the field of Russian and russophone literature. Nearly a quarter century after it's heyday, Pierre Bourdieu’s method of viewing cultural works within their orbits of production, consumption and circulation, i.e. as products of an “immense enterprise of symbolic alchemy,” appears to be on the margins of scholarly discourse. This panel encourages a rethinking of sociological approaches to literature informed by critical engagement with cultural practices from the rise of modernism to the post-Soviet era. Panelists will present how sociological approaches inform their observations of diverse institutions and cultural sites, and how their experience has shaped their particular methodological framework.

Sub Unit

• Literature: Russian and Eurasian

Chair

• Daniel Aaron Brooks, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Aesthetic Value and the Institutions of Russian Modernism - Jonathan Craig Stone, Franklin & Marshall College

• Vulgar or Rarefied? Tynianov's Sociology of Literature Then and Now - Conor Klamann, Northwestern U

• The Russian Street in the Holy Land: The Study of Russian-Israeli Literature between 1989-2013 - Alex Moshkin, U of Pennsylvania

Discussants

• Philip Gleissner, Princeton U

• Michael Heinrich Duering, Christian Albrechts U Kiel (Germany)