Sociology of Literature - The Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School

Founded in 1923, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt developed a distinctive kind of 'critical sociology' indebted to Marx, Weber and Freud. Leading Frankfurt School critics who worked on literature included Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Leo Löwenthal. Adorno's Notes to Literature, Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and Löwentahl's Literature and the Image of Man were each influential studies in the sociology of literature. Löwenthal continued this work at the University of California, Berkeley, during the 1950s.

Adorno's Notes to Literature is a collection of essays, the most influential of which is probably 'On Lyric Poetry and Society'. It argued that poetic thought is a reaction against the commodification and reification of modern life, citing Goethe and Baudelaire as examples. Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama argued that the extreme 'sovereign violence' of the 16th and 17th century German 'Trauerspiel' (literally mourning play, less literally tragedy) playwrights expressed the historical realities of princely power far better than had classical tragedy.

Habermas succeeded Adorno to the Chair of Sociology and Philosophy at Frankfurt. Habermas's first major work, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit was published in German in 1962, and in English translation as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989. It attempted to explain the socio-historical emergence of middle-class public opinion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Developing a new kind of institutional sociology of literature, it argued that the public sphere had been organised around literary salons in France, learned and literary societies in Germany, and coffee houses in England. These institutions sustained the early novel, newspaper and periodical press.