Abstract
Schutz’s lecture on the “Sociological Aspect of Literature” explores the social relationships between beholders and authors of literature; these social orientations provide the pre-communicative basis for any exchange of meaning through literature. In this chapter, Schutz’s lecture on literature is examined in the context of his phenomenology of musical experience; in the latter, Schutz identifies the “mutual tuning-in relationship ” as the sociological precondition for any form of communication, including that which is accomplished by means of literary texts. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to clarify the manner in which beholders of literature tune-in to various literary art forms, as the precondition for their understanding of the literary work.
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References
Alfred Schutz, “Making Music Together,” in Collected Papers, vol. 2, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 161 f. Hereafter, this volume will be cited textually as “II”
We keep in mind, of course, that this “message” itself is a pre-conceptual meaning that can be understood only polythetically, in a moment by moment stream of lived musical experience. See Schutz’s “Fragments toward a Phenomenology of Music,” in Collected Papers, vol. 4, ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas, and Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Acadeemic Publishers, 1996), 248 ff
For a complete discussion of this phrase as Schutz uses it in his theory of language, see A Schutz, “Symbol, Reality, and Society,” in Collected Papers, vol. 1, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 299. Hereafter, this volume will be cited textually as “I.”
‘Quasi-simultaneity’ is the expression used by Schutz to characterize the derivative mode of experiential simultaneity achieved by the musical beholder, in relation to a composer whose work is beheld at a later time: “Although separated by hundreds of years, the [beholder] participates with quasi-simultaneity in the [composer’s] stream of consciousness by performing with him step by step the ongoing articulation of his musical thought. The beholder, thus, is united with the composer by a time dimension common to both, which is nothing other than a derived form of the vivid present shared by the partners in a genuine face-to-face relation such as prevails between speaker and listener.” (II 171–72)
Lester Embree, ed., “A Construction of Alfred Schutz’s ‘Sociological Aspect of Literature’,” in Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature ”: Construction and Complementary Essays, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 3–79. Hereafter, this work will be cited textually as “Construction.”
“Construction,” 4 and 15. For further discussion of the notion of “art forms,” see also Alfred Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structure, trans. Helmut R. Wagner (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 180 ff. and 162 ff.
Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” I 230.
Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 149 f. Hereafter, this volume will be cited textually as “PSW.”
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McDuffie, M. (1998). Literature, Music, and the Mutual Tuning-in Relationship. In: Embree, L. (eds) Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature”. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9042-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9042-6_3
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