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Possibility of “Literature” in Sociology
Author(s) -
Hase Masato
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
international journal of japanese sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.133
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1475-6781
pISSN - 0918-7545
DOI - 10.1111/ijjs.12023
Subject(s) - sociology , facticity , epistemology , social geometry , sociology of leisure , sociology of knowledge , sociology of disaster , sociology of education , social science , mathematical sociology , historical sociology , phenomenological sociology , sociology of scientific knowledge , medical sociology , philosophy , medicine , nursing , public health
Sociology can be both a science and literature. While sociology as science investigates general tendencies of social phenomena through statistical analysis and advances social policies based on the understanding of their objective causes, sociology as literature focuses on the non‐generalizable aspects of an individual event and considers the reasons for the resulting actions of human beings. In this article I examine prominent works in the sociology of literature by three representative J apanese sociologists, S osuke M ita, K eiichi S akuta and S hun I noue, from the 1970s to the early 1980s. After this period, contemporary French philosophy, such as that of Foucault, introduced to J apan during the 1980s, made it clear that literature is nothing more than a social institution that produces interiority in individuals. As a result, sociology as discourse has dominated the intellectual scene in J apan ever since, eclipsing the possibility of sociology as literature, which focuses more on the romantic individual. However, I argue that an alternative possibility for sociology as literature can be found in a sociology of singularity, which grasps the concrete facticity of human activities in ordinary everyday life through reading their descriptions in works of literature.