Abstract

MALTZ, Hernán. Three for an Imperfect Pair: Sociology and Literature According to Lewis Coser, Robert Nisbet and Wolf Lepenies. Trab. soc. [online]. 2023, vol.24, n.40, pp.61-80.  Epub Jan 01, 2023. ISSN 1514-6871.

After an introduction in which I show a brief and selective overview of the sociology of literature (with a concrete diagnosis of its neglected state-of-the-art in our country), I am interested in recovering and reading together three books that have remained on the margins of the already neglected subdiscipline: Sociology Through Literature: An Introductory Reader, by Lewis Coser, La sociología como forma de arte, by Robert Nisbet, and Las tres culturas. La sociología entre la literatura y la ciencia, by Wolf Lepenies. I describe and analyze how each of these three works conceives and posits definitions of sociology, of literature, and of the linkages between the two. Synthetically, we I that Coser, Nisbet and Lepenies offer three (related yet different) ways of conceiving the relations between the two factors: sociology through literature (Coser), sociology as an art form (Nisbet), and sociology as a culture in tension with literature (Lepenies). While these condensed formulas do not exhaust the options for conceiving the links between sociology and literature, they are three significant matrices for continuing to problematize a pair never fully elaborated or conceptualized in an entirely satisfactory manner, and at the same time they constitute three milestones for reactivating theoretical inquiries into a sociology of literature made in and from Argentina.

Keywords : Sociology; Literature; Sociology of Literature; Argentina.

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