Approaches to Genre: The Novel

What is sociological knowledge? How do certain novels acquire the resources to produce sociological forms of knowledge?  In particular, what aesthetic practices and what features of novelistic form contribute to this kind of knowledge production? What critical frameworks allow us to perceive this aspect of the conceptual or representational work that novels do?  We will use a series of American, French, and English novels to pursue these questions, reading in tandem with them a variety of classic sociological works, including work by Durkheim, Weber, Du Bois, Simmel, Bourdieu, and a few others, as well as some recent literary criticism.

Novels:  Balzac, Old Man Goriot; Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical, Trollope, Phineas Finn,  Proust, The Guermantes Way;  Ellison, Invisible Man