Abstract
This chapter introduces the research question and the work’s research design, which deals with the importance of fiction for a society supposedly based on factuality. It also provides a first rough description of the work’s central concept, the “paradigm of interpretation,” which captures the relation critics establish between an artwork and social reality as it develops in a public discourse. The author argues that art becomes socially meaningful through paradigms of interpretation and that these are representative of a social order. Struggles between paradigms are therefore always struggles between different social orders. It is through these paradigms that fiction can become a means for social transformation. An overview of the cases analyzed rounds out this section. The introduction then concisely explains the methodological approach and the amendments needed to adapt Grounded Theory Methodology to a research question in cultural sociology.
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Notes
- 1.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “The Paradox of Fiction” (by Steven Schneider), http://www.iep.utm.edu/fict-par/ (accessed March 23, 2016). See this entry for a description of the controversy and the different positions represented here.
- 2.
See Chap. 2 for the theoretical development of this concept.
- 3.
Iser’s work Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (En: The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response) (Iser (1976) 1994) in particular has to be mentioned here.
- 4.
The anthology Gründlich verstehen. Literaturkritik heute is in fact concerned with discussing the normative principles of literary criticism (Görtz and Ueding 1985).
- 5.
The term imaginal is derived from Chiara Bottici’s study Imaginal Politics, in which she argues that the term is better capable of giving expression to the aspect of meaning as founded in pictorial (re)presentations in contrast to the notions of imagination and imaginary, which are based in the individual psyche or the social respectively. The idea of the imaginal avoids taking sides about where the (re)presentations reside, and focuses on the sheer relation of meaning and (re)presentation (Bottici 2014).
- 6.
“This is how he [Felix Kjellberg a.k.a. PewDiePie, MK] literally became a voice of his generation, a voice which is not meant to be understood by the older generation. This is the basic principle of any new pop culture: it is this special knowledge that is generative of youth’s control and agency” (Kreye 2016).
- 7.
In fact, in an early proposal of this work, I planned on doing a Qualitative Content Analysis. However, it soon became clear that it was impossible to generate hypotheses from which I could derive the codes for coding.
- 8.
For a constructivist critique of Glaser’s continued adherence to the idea of pure “emergence,” see Bryant (2007).
- 9.
Strauss’ training at the Chicago School is pointed out by Mey and Mruck (2007, p. 23).
- 10.
For a description of and instruction on the use of comparative analysis, see Corbin and Strauss (2008, pp. 73–78).
- 11.
Theoretical sampling is extensively described in Chapter 7, “Theoretical Sampling,” in Corbin and Strauss (2008, pp. 143–157).
- 12.
At this point, I would like to thank both institutions. Without their friendly and competent assistance this research would have been much more arduous.
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Knapp, M. (2020). Introduction. In: Cultural Controversies in the West German Public Sphere. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40086-6_1
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