Writing as a combat sport: Autosociobiography and social mobility – A reply to Friedman, Savage, and Spoerhase

In ‘Beyond the “Scholarship Boy” Paradigm: Autosociobiography and Social Mobility’, Friedman, Savage, and Spoerhase compellingly demonstrate the interdisciplinary reach of autosociobiography by examining what this literary genre can offer to sociological understandings of the ‘social mobility malaise’ in times of rising inequality. Drawing on the work and life of Annie Ernaux, I will argue that, despite recognising the possibilities that creative, literary, and cultural methods offer to sociological analyses of mobility, the authors stop short of engaging the radical potential of autosociobiography as an aesthetic form and mode of social critique. By engaging the semiotic meanings of autosociobiography only at a surface level – without sustained close reading – Friedman et al. overlook its political and aesthetic capacity to develop an ‘existential language’ that connects fraught and irreducible life stories to oppressive and unjust social structures. A more sustained engagement with the aesthetic and narrative devices of literary texts would not simply extend sociological analyses of social mobility, but reconfigure the terms through which these subjective experiences can be studied and understood in genuinely interdisciplinary ways.