Sally Rooney and Cultural Sociology of Literature: Towards Epistemological Symmetry within Literature-and-Society Research

Abstract Before the foundation of sociology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, both social scientific and literary scholars sought to provide tools for navigating increasingly complex societies and ever-more pressing social issues. More than providing a fixed set of definitions, literary texts excelled in theorizing the social in the sense of the Greek theōrein , meaning to consider or speculate. However, due to growing disciplinary specialization, sociology began mimicking methods of the sciences, becoming more plausible in delivering social knowledge. The relationship between sociology and literature has mainly become one of a knowing subject and a passive object – hence the preposition »of« in the sociology of literature. Contemporary sociology of literature has predominantly focused on literary production, subordinating literary works to social interactions and institutions – the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his follower Gisèle Sapiro being prime examples. Even sociologists who recognize the usefulness of literature for its intrinsic qualities often view literary texts as passive objects to be translated into sociological discourse. I propose a cultural sociology of literature to remedy this epistemological asymmetry. Following the Yale School of Cultural Sociology, the proposed model refuses to reduce literature to a mere epiphenomenon of its social dimensions. Instead, it recognizes literary works »as relatively autonomous cultural entities« possessing their own agency. The key is a symmetrical analytical focus on the inner structures of literary texts as well as their social surroundings. To secure this principle, I employ two concepts. First, I adopt the concept of iconic experience, which the Yale School developed to grasp the nondiscursive, aesthetic dimensions of social life. I employ the iconic experience to account for the meaning-making as it occurs within a spatio-temporally unique reading experience while also being navigated by persistent cultural patterns and norms. Second, I operationalize the concept of structures of feeling to tackle social phenomena broadly shared over time yet lacking more explicit discursive definitions. These nondiscursive collective representations – sometimes called Zeitgeist or generational feeling – can be captured intelligibly by literary forms and aesthetic devices, as these can easily signify ambiguity and openness of meaning. I argue a combination of sociological and literary theoretical discourse is needed to capture aspects of the social-literary interaction usually »lost in translation« between literary and sociological genres. I develop this research model through a case study of the Irish author Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People . The goal is to trace how the »literary« and the »social« mutually constitute each other and partake in the overall process of meaning-making. What is the role of Normal People’ s literary form in creating a well-marketed book product, connected with its supposed extraordinary intellectual merits as a »generational novel«? Thanks to its aesthetic devices, Rooney’s novel presents social relationships as a social fact that escapes discursive definition yet heavily impacts social action. On the one hand, the characters have the intellectual and reflexive capacity to perpetually evaluate and categorize their actions when navigating the turbulent waters of romance and intimacy. On the other hand, the prevalent emotional culture makes them yield their agency to social norms and the normalized ideal of social relationships as effortless and natural. Unlike scholarly accounts, reading Rooney’s novel can account for social relationships both as a unity – relatively stable structures of feeling upon which all social relationships feed – and as a polyvalent ambiguity – experiencing social relationships as self-contradictory, volatile, and tacit. That is possible due to the iconic experience of reading, which renders social theorizing through novels as a condensed and indivisible blend of sensual immediacy and abstract representations.