Socio-criticism, Mediations and Interdisciplinarity

“It is not yet certain that the term ‘socio-criticism’ [...] has been purged of all ambiguity,” wrote Claude Duchet in 1975. This “theoretical malaise,” according to Duchet, should have been temporary, due to the novelty of socio-critical studies; nevertheless, everything indicates that the discomfort endures and that it generates its own set of re-foundations or theoretical assessments. Is this because of the lack of a specific object, which usually produces a coherent conceptual apparatus and a specific methodology, as Duchet posited? Rather, it is due to the state of in-betweenness inherent to the very objective of socio-criticism. Indeed, as soon as scholars seek to explore the sociality of the text, to elucidate the processes and stakes of the semiotic transformation of the social operated by and in the text, that is, to articulate textual and social phenomena by means of analysis, there is an inevitable “epistemological leap from text to context,” a leap from theories and methods elaborated for an object (literature) to other approaches elaborated through distinct frameworks and perspectives (sociology, social history, sociolinguistics). However, lest the social be absorbed entirely into the text and made into a verbal construct, or everything be reduced to sociological considerations, scholars must make this leap. It may well be that socio-criticism is entirely devoted to taking on and elucidating this awkward state, this in-betweenness, through the notion of mediation. On this subject, Duchet helpfully writes, “If it is true that there is nothing in the text that does not result from a certain action of society, . . . it is also true that this action is not directly accountable for anything, thus the decisive importance of mediations.” Similarly, Edmond Cros more recently writes that socio-criticism aims to reconstitute “the set of mediations that deconstruct, displace, reorganize, or re-semanticize the different representations of individual and collective experience.” Through this lens, socio-criticism can be defined as the study of the multiple forms of mediation between literature and the order of discourses, as well as between social discourse (which includes literary discourse) and the artistic, social, economic, political and religious phenomena of any given era. It is thus important to conceptually grasp these mediations, to identify the appropriate methods to elucidate them in order to clarify how the social is operated upon in different textual corpuses, whether or not these corpuses were produced and received as “literary.” Examining texts through a dynamic triangulation with the two other poles of discursive configurations and socio-historic configurations also precludes any frontal opposition with the discipline of sociology of literature, allowing the formation of other connections without creating any confusion between these two distinct approaches. It is rather a question of identifying how to achieve the necessary interdisciplinary work, for which approaches other than the sociology of literature are indispensible. The ambition of socio-criticism within literary studies and, more generally, within the humanities and social sciences, may be exactly this: to (re)think and (re)read more specifically the dynamics of mediation between the social and its representations in all their historicity and textual density. In this reading of socio-criticism’s work of the in-between, we postulate that the logic underlying mediations and, more generally, relations between individuals and systems, fields, or frameworks of action, may be qualified as light determinism. We, therefore, do not subscribe to heavily deterministic conceptions that tend to overvalue the agency of overarching mechanisms. More particularly, we do not subscribe to studies of literature that reduce what plays out in texts and in discourses to the mere effects of laws, state of affairs, infrastructural hierarchies or hegemonies. Nor do we adhere to conceptions that focus …