Towards a cultural sociology of contemporary Basque literature: mirrors and tools, betwen system and ideological frames

Abstract

This article presents a theorizing pre-study of sociology of literature that can be used as theoretical and analytical frame for research purposes. Ferguson, Desan and Griswold (1988) indicated the three main assets for a sociology of literature: text (mirror), system (demons) and ideological frames. A pragmatic sociology of literature (Dromi and Illouz, 2010) was one of the new perspectives of sociology of literature identified by English (2010). In the recently proposed comparative cultural sociology (Lamont and Thévenot, 2000), a constructivist and reflexive proposal is developed to analyze and evaluate the field of cultural production (Beljean, et al, 2016). Within this broad comparative cultural sociology, societies and social actors, to understand their own realities, are depicted as deploying different tools produced in their respective societies. Literature is one of these tools, especially, those literary works dealing with society’s relevant features and concerns, and those that have gained a minimum of status and public. Thus, for a cultural sociology approach to literature the integration and deployment of the metaphors of mirror and tool is proposed, together with the concepts of literary system and ideological frames. To apply this analytical framework to contemporary literature in Basque, a conceptualization of Basque reality is needed. In the complex Basque reality two features-challenges are selected: integrative bridging between tradition-village and innovation-city, and pluralism among different. Among the broad population of selectable authors, three writers from different periods and with a considerable status and readership have been selected: G. Aresti, B. Atxaga eta K. Uribe. In order to advance issues for further research, it is thus analyzed how the main literary works of these authors deal with the two identified significant features-challenges of the Basque reality.