Metadata
Title
Topics in Literary Theory and History: Literature and Sociology: Forms of Communal Knowledge
Category
graduate
UUID
3213ea01f5824a659f20b4d9d945fa41
Source URL
https://german.princeton.edu/whats-on/courses/graduate/2025-26-fall/ger-532
Parent URL
https://german.princeton.edu/whats-on/courses/previous/graduate
Crawl Time
2026-03-10T04:20:15+00:00
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Topics in Literary Theory and History: Literature and Sociology: Forms of Communal Knowledge

Source: https://german.princeton.edu/whats-on/courses/graduate/2025-26-fall/ger-532 Parent: https://german.princeton.edu/whats-on/courses/previous/graduate

GER 532

Topics in Literary Theory and History: Literature and Sociology: Forms of Communal Knowledge

Fall 2025

W

1:30pm - 4:20pm

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1262&courseid=016788

While it is a truism that literature speaks of society, calling the social sciences literary seems unsound. How did this asymmetry evolve and what are its poetic, epistemic, and theoretical effects? This seminar traces the literature-sociology-nexus from its 1800 origins to today. We will read sociological case-studies by novelists and experimental fictions by sociologists, study analyses by Simmel, Lukács, Lenk, Barthes, Bourdieu, Lepenies, and Sapiro and investigate key crossovers such as the Collège de Sociologie, the Frankfurt School, ethnographic surrealism, sociology of literature, affect studies, critical fabulation, and autofiction. Taught in English.

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