Literature, Science, and Postmodernist Theory

Abstract

In ‘Why Realism Matters: Literary Knowledge and the Philosophy of Science,’ Paisley Livingston discusses what he terms ‘sociological holism’ and the problems with it as an approach to literary study. ‘A central problem,’ he claims,

has been the failure of critical theorists to grasp the most basic lessons of methodological individualism. Critics ask how a particular work ‘reflects’ or ‘contests’ some social totality or dominant discourse, but they fail to reflect sufficiently on the ontological status of the latter, endowing it with dubious causal powers. Moreover, such critics typically fail to confront the difficult epistemological problems that are raised by this kind of sociological holism, which typically begins and ends with some set of untested theses about the nature of global structures, moments, systems, and sets of institutions. The heroic critic takes on the monumental task of mediating back and forth between claims about the social totality and the particular work, but the results of these dialectical efforts are easily challenged by historians who are closer to the facts. Another typical shortcoming of holist sociologists, and of the literary criticisms inscribed within them, is that they typically fail to attend sufficiently to the processes at work in the individual agent’s assimilation of, and resistance to, the influences, discourses, etc., of the putative social totality.