Sociology of the literary text according to Pierre V. Zima

Abstract

The interaction between society and literary work dates back to antiquity. Over time, various ways of approaching the literary text through the prism of sociality have emerged, starting with positivist criticism and culminating in sociocriticism. Sociocriticism, however, through the analyzes it proposes, at the semantic, syntactic and narrative levels, is an attempt, at a higher level, to return to literarity, ensuring an global text analysis. In terms of approaches, sociocritics knows several schools and individual researchers. One of them is Pierre Zima. Zima distinguishes a sociology of the text whose task is to examine the representations of social problems at the linguistic level. According to him, the work is at the intersection of literature and social languages. In Zima’s vision, the sociology of the text aims to reveal the collective interests, the social, economic struggles and political, starting from the study of the lexical, semantic, syntactic field, the intertextual reading of literary work, decipherment of sociolects and discourses, etc. Thus, sociocriticism becomes a reinventory of the theory of Bahtinian dialogism.

Keywords

• sociocriticism
• sociology of the text
• sociolects
• sociality
• social facts
• sociolinguistics
• dialogic contexts
• semantic
• syntactic and narrative plans