True Pleasure

“To reduce aesthetics to the results of sales strategy is to equate the pleasure we take in reading to being duped by a marketing campaign,” one critic erringly wrote in response to Big Fiction, my Bourdieusian account of the recent history of American literature. “The cynicism of this notion is impressive,” he added, “if also disgusting” (Lorentzen).1 It's an old complaint, one Pierre Bourdieu responded to in the opening of The Rules of Art several decades ago by noting that such resistance to demystification could be “lifted from one of the innumerable timeless and nameless defenses of reading and culture,” which would have “unleashed the furious mirth that the well-meaning commonplaces of his day inspired in Flaubert” (xv).We can take measure of the threat sociology poses to an aesthete by the viciousness of his attack. My critic assumes a caustic sarcasm when battling my “ridiculous, tedious, irrelevant, and dubious arguments.” Something he loves is in danger. “Literature's perennial advantage over sociology,” he writes, taking a page from Cleanth Brooks, is that it gains purchase on society “through the means of irony, paradox, and beauty.” He achieves his rhetorical climax in his final sentence, writing, “[W]hen you are a teenager and you have shut yourself into a room to read Kafka for the first time, your parents and your little sister should stop knocking on the door because you are turning into something else, something they will never understand” (Lorentzen). Against himself, the critic has become a perfect Bourdieusian, recognizing that “you” use Kafka to distinguish yourself from your family. He cherishes that distinction. What is most in danger from sociology, as becomes clear, is the critic's self-image. “Why such implacable hostility to those who try to advance the understanding of the work of art and of aesthetic experience,” writes Bourdieu, “if not because the very ambition to produce a scientific analysis of that individuum ineffabile and of the individuum ineffabile who produced it constitutes a mortal threat to the pretension, so common (at least among art lovers) and yet so ‘distinguished,’ of thinking of oneself as an ineffable individual?” (xvii). My critic's contempt for those who fail to recognize aesthetics on its own terms—“Like whimpering dogs,” he writes, “philistines will always be with us”—finds its primal scene in adolescent alienation, the imprinting, through literature, of a sense of superiority, of being among the elect, of one's taste making one special (Lorentzen). He never grew out of it.The aesthete fears the loss of pleasure. But Bourdieu promises a deeper, truer, grown-up pleasure. When one understands the source of the “singularity of the literary experience,” one achieves “the possibility of genuine freedom from one's determinations.” Sociology, with the freedom it offers, “furnishes artistic experience, and the pleasure which accompanies it, with its best justification, its richest nourishment. Through it, sensible love of the work can fulfill itself in a sort of amor intellectualis rei” (Bourdieu xix). And so, Bourdieu charts the genesis and structure of the literary field. Tracing it from Immanuel Kant through Charles Baudelaire and toward the present, he shows how it became possible for a critic in 2024 to tremble in the shadow of the sociology of literature.But I am assuming knowledge that my reader might not have. What is the sociology of literature? And why is everyone talking about it? Lee Konstantinou writes about “the recent rise of literary sociology,” “once a marginal tendency within American literary studies.” Walt Hunter refers to “the emergent critical consensus, from Mark McGurl through Dan Sinykin, that institutions are the proper object of analysis for literary criticism” (1146). Brandon Taylor suggests that sociology, with its predilection for publishing history and spreadsheets, has burst out of the academy to become ubiquitous in contemporary criticism.They are seeing an illusion. It is a power of the sociology of literature to appear central when it is, as a field of literary studies in the United States, peripheral. A few monographs come along and receive disproportionate attention among their hundreds of contemporaries, giving the impression of a “rise” or a “consensus” that isn't there. “It is surprising that in the United States, where consciousness of the power of cultural forms has been sharpened by feminist, queer, and antiracist movements, the sociology of literature remains so marginal,” writes Gisèle Sapiro, a French scholar and among the world's foremost sociologists of literature, in the preface to the English-language translation—by Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman—of her handbook, The Sociology of Literature (xiv). Her goal is to change that.Sapiro earned her doctorate under Bourdieu at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris in 1994. Five years later she published her revised thesis as La guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953, which came out in English with Duke University Press in 2014 as The French Writers’ War, 1940–1953. At more than five hundred pages, it is an extraordinarily detailed and documented analysis of how and why more than a hundred French writers made political decisions under Nazi occupation; Sapiro coordinates those decisions with their literary positions. Except for The Sociology of Literature, her other books have not yet been published in English. She has written dozens of essays on globalization, publishing, translation, and the responsibility of writers, many of them available in English. According to Google Scholar, her work has been cited more than ten thousand times. Methodologically, she is very much a social scientist, seldom interpreting literature, instead using interviews, surveys, and quantitative analysis to study literary history, methods that few in US literary studies—Loren Glass, Laura B. McGrath, Janice Radway, among others—have seriously tried.The Sociology of Literature was first published in France in 2014 as part of a series of accessible and brief introductions to areas of study, “the remit of which,” writes Sapiro, “is to take stock of a research domain and propose new directions for it (the collection is aimed primarily at students, but also at researchers engaging in the discipline)” (xiv). Think of Oxford University Press's A Very Short Introduction series. Sapiro's book comes to us as a stand-alone title from Stanford University Press, which has published many of Bourdieu's volumes in the United States. Sapiro's task is to survey a vast terrain and to condense it into an approachable terrarium, which she accomplishes deftly, mostly.In a brief introduction, Sapiro defines her subject capaciously, as the study of “literature as a social phenomenon,” concerned not only with the formal analysis of literary works but also with the forces of production and reception that ineluctably situate any work among the “totality” of literature, “present and past” (1). The meaning of the work, then, resides in “a national or international space of possibles (as defined by Bourdieu)” (2). Here we encounter a bit of jargon—“space of possibles”—that indicates the book's most considerable flaw: Sapiro is so immersed in Bourdieusian thought that she fails to recognize when his conceptual apparatus needs explanation, never more than in the first chapter, a history of the sociology of literature. She runs through protosociological writers in France, from Germaine de Staël to Hippolyte Taine, discusses one of the founders of modern sociology, Gustave Lanson, and takes us up to the first real popularizer of the sociology of literature, Robert Escarpit, whose Sociology of Literature was published in 1958. From there, Sapiro presents Marxist sociologists who will be familiar to an American audience: Lucien Goldmann, the Frankfurt School, and the Birmingham School, culminating in Fredric Jameson's theorization of causality and mediation in The Political Unconscious (1981). That's when Sapiro arrives at Bourdieu, who she positions beside Howard Becker and Itamar Even-Zohar as one of the dominant figures of contemporary sociology of literature—and clearly, for her, the best. She describes Bourdieu's core concepts—capital, field, habitus, illusio—but where her other capsule accounts are, for the most part, cogent, here she cannot achieve the necessary distance for an introduction to students.2The second chapter offers an overview of the sociology of literary production. Sapiro addresses the conditions of production in illiberal states before presenting a historical account of the genesis of “literature” as we presently understand it in the West. Hers is the Bourdieusian account in which aesthetics first gains relative autonomy from usefulness with Kant; literature narrows its purview in the nineteenth century as chunks of its terrain calve off with the rise of the disciplines of anthropology, history, psychology, and so on; and, at the same time, the book market reaches a state of maturity that leads writers away from “state control and patronage” and toward “dependence on consumer demand,” providing the conditions for Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert to declare independence from the market and to inaugurate modernism (51). In recent decades, we witness a shift toward the professionalization of authorship—especially, in the United States, through creative writing programs. Under present conditions, publishers, residencies, state subsidies, and writing programs are all ripe topics for the sociology of literature.Doing justice to the literary work—Sapiro's concern in her third chapter—requires more than attention to representation (topic, theme, identity, content); it requires, also, attention to form. That critics ought to synthesize form and content is common sense for US literary studies. But here Sapiro returns to Bourdieu's “space of possibles,” which is crucial, in her account, for understanding form. Sapiro's translators, in their preface, note that were it not for the established use of the phrase in Bourdieu's extant translations, they might have gone with “space of possibilities”: it names the distribution of options a writer has for their work at any juncture (xi). The contours of such a space depend on the state of the literary field and the writer's position on it, which is determined by their age, gender, nationality, and education. (Sapiro does not give much attention to race, which is a dominant factor for a writer's possibilities in the United States.) For example, in commercial publishing in the United States in the 1990s, it was widely believed that fiction by Black men wouldn't sell; if a Black man wanted to publish with a commercial press, he had a narrow range of possibilities for form and representation: he might write historical fiction or street lit, and he would definitely be incentivized to foreground identity. Percival Everett refused those constraints and published instead with Graywolf, a small nonprofit publisher, which allowed him to experiment.3 Across three decades, he accumulated cultural capital at Graywolf, which he finally cashed out after his longtime editor, Fiona McCrae, retired; he moved to Doubleday, an imprint of Penguin Random House, the world's largest trade publisher, and received a massive advance for James, a rewriting of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective, a commercially viable project also perfectly positioned for US prize culture: it won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.Prizes, critical esteem, bestsellerdom, and other institutions of consecration are Sapiro's quarry in her fourth and final chapter, on reception. The literary field depends on these factors to organize it along the axes of prestige and popularity. Sociologists of literature investigate the inner workings of these institutions to explain why the field looks like it does. In the United States, James F. English helped introduce Bourdieu's ideas to literary studies with The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Literary Value, published by Harvard University Press in 2005. Field theory shows how reception creates the conditions for production: when Everett cashed out his cultural capital—gathered from writing books like Glyph, a detective novel whose protagonist is a Derridean and a literal baby—he didn't write just any commercial book; he wrote one astute about the kinds of books that win major prizes. (Everett blurbed The Economy of Prestige.) Sapiro notes that scholars have been slow to catch up with the transnational circulation of literature, which invites investigations of translation, such as Rebecca Walkowitz's Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. Literary festivals remain understudied, and Sapiro has a few fascinating pages on their role in buttressing the belief in literature among lay readers. She ends with an inquiry into the sociology of reading.Sapiro's goal with The Sociology of Literature is to build the field. “Still poorly institutionalized despite an already well-established tradition,” she writes in her conclusion, “the sociology of literature is nevertheless poised to reinvigorate the thinking in the two disciplines to which it belongs” (149). Throughout, she flags opportunities for research: residencies, translation, festivals, the professionalization of writing, how writers coordinate social strategy and literary form. This service alone makes the volume valuable for anyone interested in the field. For American scholars, who are sometimes guilty (myself included) of a provincial neglect of scholarship from elsewhere, Sapiro's embedment in France and her advocacy of a transnational sociology of literature are salutary. Her implicit goal is to reinforce Bourdieu's dominance. As a Bourdieusian, I don't mind. But US readers might be surprised by the near-total eclipse of French sociologist Bruno Latour, who receives just passing mention and merits no entries in the capacious list of works cited. Latour's sociology has been much more influential than Bourdieu's in US literary studies through the work of Jane Bennett, Rita Felski, and Caroline Levine, among others. If we were to count them, let alone Jameson, among sociologists of literature, then the field would be far from marginal.In her preface, Sapiro notes that The Sociology of Literature already “serves—in South America in particular, but also elsewhere (in Germany, for instance)—as a reference, along with Bourdieu's The Rules of Art and Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, for the development of research in this domain” (xv). This is right and good. Bourdieu and Casanova explain “capital,” “field,” “habitus,” and “illusio” better than Sapiro and elaborate the concepts extensively through powerful case studies. Sapiro provides a ten-thousand-foot view impossible to find elsewhere at this level of acuity and expertise, drawn from decades at the top of the field. For Anglophone scholars, I suggest adding English's The Economy of Prestige to the starter pack.Though marginal, the sociology of literature in the United States and Canada is dynamic and growing, with recent contributions from Bedecarré, Libman, Konstantinou, Evan Brier, Sarah Brouillette, Sarah Bull, Jordan Carroll, Clayton Childress, Phillipa K. Chong, Jacqueline Goldsby, Claire Grossman, Andras Kiséry, Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath, Mark McGurl, Anna Muenchrath, Kinohi Nishikawa, Amy Paeth, J. D. Porter, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Nora Shaalan, Juliana Spahr, Nick Sturm, John K. Young, and Stephanie Young, among others. Sapiro's book confirms the vastness of the research agenda, how much we have yet to learn, how much work is yet to do. As in the anecdote with which I opened this review, the sociology of literature is contentious, it challenges our commitments and investigates why we care. Its pleasures are real.

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