Sociology of Slovenian Literature: Premises and Methods

Abstract

The sociology of Slovenian literature is positioned between general sociology and literary studies with its history and theory. It can thus take the form of historical sociology that connects empirical sociology with cultural historical categories. It explores the social context of literary periods and their sequence of development. It is based on the empirical model developed by Escarpit, but such that it understands the sociology of literary “production” (i.e., the author) of the “distribution” and “reception” from a historical perspective. It expands Escarpit’s model with a sociological analysis of literary works, whereby it only analyzes those aspects in them that are accessible to sociology. These include ideological elements in their content and form. The task of literary sociology is to establish their correlation with the social context. – The sociology of Slovenian literature must improve its empirical basis with socio-historical concepts that fit the specific character and development of Slovenian literature. It regards the traditional concept of “literature” as designations for the basic development stages in a historical order: medieval folk and church literature, church literature from the mid-sixteenth to mid-eighteenth century, and “secular” literature from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. Sociologically, they can be interpreted in correlation with the concepts of “society” and “community,” but with a different meaning that it was ascribed to them by Tönnies and his school. Their meaning is defined in terms of the political, social, and cultural shifts in Slovenia: from the medieval and early modern class-based society to the Slovenian bourgeois society of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century; at the same time, from an intellectual-cultural community that was based on Christianity and included the entire population of the Slovenian lands until the mid-eighteenth century, to the intellectual-cultural community of the Slovenian nation that included both its Christian part and the new secular intelligentsia oriented towards freethought. With bourgeois society and the ethnic community, literature in the sense of belles lettres was formed. In contrast to the original Christian community that was supranational and homogenous, the new community was national and heterogeneous. The differences, oppositions, and conflicts embedded in its composition continued to provide the impetus for its development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. – Similar to the sociological explanation of folk and church literature, the socio-historical understanding of Slovenian literature from the Enlightenment onwards also demands more than quantitative empirically precise methods; the material gained through these methods must be interpreted at a higher level using socio-historical concepts and their hermeneutic application.