Principal Investigators:
Florian Fuchs (Princeton University) [email protected] & Website
Marc Ortmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) [email protected] & Website
WHAT IS SOCIONARRATOLOGY?
Socionarratology is an emerging interdisciplinary field that bridges Literary Studies, Cultural Studies and the Social Sciences. The compound noun is deliberately chosen: it marks the gap between these disciplines and promises their bridging. At its core, Socionarratology asks one overarching question: “How are collective narratives produced, and how do they in turn produce the social world?” It studies the two-way street between narrative and society – how social groups craft stories, and how those stories function within, and upon, the social world.
The project operates on three interlocking levels. First, as a disciplinary overlap: it reopens a third space for thinking about all modes of social speech that since the 19th century have been fragmented across separate academic disciplines. Second, as an epistemological inquiry: it excavates the perennial existence of narratological knowledge and its uses within the social realm – what the project calls socionarratives. Third, as an analysis of social imagination: it examines the practices of narrated imagination within their social settings – what the project calls socionarration.
WHY SOCIONARRATOLOGY NOW? THE RESEARCH GAP
Despite a growing mutual approximation between literary scholars and sociologists – evidenced by paradigmatic studies such as Gisèle Sapiro’s The Sociology of Literature (2014) and Juliana Spahr’s Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (2018) – there remains a lack of systematic reflection on what these two fields share and what they could offer one another.
For sociology, this gap means that despite extensive use of literary material – as illustration, as primary data, or as an epistemological supplement – there exists no systematic narratological framework for analysing how narratives shape social dynamics. For literary studies, it means that while scholars excel at analysing the poetic structure and hermeneutic potential of texts, the field rarely accounts for how literary forms, genres, and semantic processes affect social processes at the micro- or macroscale, or for collectively situated, sociologically grounded readers. The sociology of literature, the one prior field that tried to bridge this divide, rose in the late 1960s and faded in the 1980s. While a clear revival is underway, it remains unevenly developed and fragmented.
What is missing is a unified conceptual vocabulary and interdisciplinary methodology capable of systematically analysing the mutual constitution of narrative and social life. Socionarratology steps into this gap by combining narratology (forms, plots, regimes of fiction) with qualitative sociology (practices, usages, effects) to describe how narratives produce the social – and how the social, in return, produces narratives.