GoKawiilOne way of studying literature is through direct experience. You read a book, you observe that it is excellent, and you try to describe the experience of reading it.
But there also exist other ways. And one of the most promising new approaches to come out of the academy is the “sociology of literature”—the study of how ‘literature’ is created, experienced and defined by the world at large.
Right now, in 2026, one of the main ways literature is constructed is through a set of interlocking institutions—creative-writing departments, book review pages, prestige publishers, grants and fellowships and residencies and awards—that all have the explicit aim of encouraging literary excellence.
The study of these institutions has resulted in a number of interesting books. The two most well-known are Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, which examines MFA programs, and Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, which looks at the publishing industry. But these books are far from alone, there was also Inside The Critic’s Circle (a study of book reviewing), The Economy of Prestige (on book prizes), and I’m sure many others.
The sociology of literature can be controversial. In his review of Big Fiction, Christian Lorentzen took aim at the whole field, saying that Sinykin “reduces aesthetics and their pleasures to market strategies and susceptibilities”.
But I think this criticism doesn’t really hold up. And here’s why:
Imagine that we had a ‘sociology of literature’ study that was about the dynamics of a medieval scriptorium. Imagine that you could embed yourself as a fly on the wall in the meeting where various monks advocate for the copying of different medieval manuscripts. This is also a marketplace. Every manuscript takes six months of work and takes hide of fifty sheep. Now imagine you hear some monk advocating that they make a copy of this poem, Beowulf. The existence of this poem is one of the great mysteries of English literature. Why did some monastery in the 11th-century spend so much time and energy copying a centuries old poem that likely has a pre-Christian origin?
We can surmise many different possibilities. It’s preserved as part of the Nowell Codex, which includes information on many monsters and marvels. Maybe it was preserved because Beowulf is about a set of monsters: Grendel and his mom and the dragon. Perhaps they didn’t care about the poem as a literary object at all.
But maybe that’s putting the cart before the horse. Maybe they actually assembled the rest of the codex around Beowulf, to create an ostensible reason for preserving this unique text. Was the desire to preserve Beowulf the whole reason for the existence of the manuscript? Or was its preservation only incidental, because it happened to fit with the overall theme of the project?
This would be a highly fascinating thing to know, and it would influence the way we read Beowulf. If we understand Beowulf to have been preserved because of its literary quality, then we might understand its poetic features as being typical of a certain genre of poetry that’s largely lost. Whereas if we understand Beowulf to have been preserved only incidentally, then we cannot guess with nearly so much confidence about its origins.
... continue reading