Abstract
Schutz’s remarks on the “Sociological Aspect of Literature” provides the occasion for reconsidering the dramaturgical approach to the study of society. By combining the Burkean dramatistic pentad with Schutz’s conceptualizations of the intersubjective relations that prevail in actor/audience encounters, and, at the same time, historicizing the Schutz-Gurwitsch debate over the character and quality of Umwelten, it is possible to resolve certain dilemmas posed by recent postmodernist thinkers and to open social sciences to a humane and egalitarian approach to the investigation and understanding of the “Other.“
[A]ll this life of mortal men, what is it else but a certain kind of stage play? Whereas men come forth disguised one in one array, another in another, each playing his part. —Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (1549)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Lester Embree, ed., “A Construction of Alfred Schutz’s ‘Sociological Aspect of Literature’,” in Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature “: Construction and Complementary Essays, ed. Lester Embree(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 3–79.
Stanford M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott, The Drama of Social Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
See Stanford M. Lyman, “Postmodernism and a Sociology of the Absurd,” in Wilderness of Mirrors: Symbolic Interaction and the Postmodern Terrain, ed. Jonathon Epstein (New York: Garland Publishing Co., forthcoming).
Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 41.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. 37–96.
William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (1906; reprint, Boston: Ginn and Co., 1940), 13–15.
Stanford M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott, A Sociology of the Absurd, rev. ed. (Dix Hills, N.Y.: General Hall, Inc., 1989), 22–50, 182–190.
Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993), 1.
Derrida, Positions, 82.
Derrida, Positions, 43.
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 95–117.
Jacques Derrida, “Difference” (address given before the Société francaise de philosophie, January 27, 1968), trans. Alan Bass, in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–28. Quotation from p. 13.
Jacques Derrida, “Difference” (address given before the Société francaise de philosophie, January 27, 1968), trans. Alan Bass, in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–28. Quotation from p. 13., 17.
Jacques Derrida, “Difference” (address given before the Société francaise de philosophie, January 27, 1968), trans. Alan Bass, in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–28. Quotation from p. 13.
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August, 1984): 53–92. Quotation from p. 83. Quoted in Pauline Marie Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: Insights Inroads, and Intrusions, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 69.
Embree, Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature, “ 17–20.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 31.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 196–224.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, The William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in the History of American Civilization, 1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). For further discussion of Gates’s and Morrison’s postmodern analyses, see Stanford M. Lyman, Color, Culture, Civilization: Race and Minority Issues in American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 25–27, 349–384.
See Maurice Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text: Essays, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 143–148.
Alfred Schutz, “Mozart and the Philosophers,” in Collected Papers, vol. 2, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 179–200. Quotation from p. 195.
Alfred Schutz, “Mozart and the Philosophers,” in Collected Papers, vol. 2, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 179–200. , 196. Emphasis in original.
Alfred Schutz, “Meaning Structures of Drama and Opera,” in Life Forms and Meaning Structure, ed. Ilja Srubar and trans. Helmut Wagner (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 180–207. Quotation from p. 181.
Richard Grathoff, ed., Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, trans. J. Claude Evans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
Alfred Schutz, “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology,” American Journal of Sociology 49, no. 6 (May, 1944): 499–507. Reprinted in Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. 2, 91–105.
Aron Gurwitsch to Alfred Schutz, July 16, 1944, in Grathoff, Philosophers in Exile, 69–72.
Schutz, “The Stranger,” 105.
Grathoff, Philosophers in Exile, 70, 71, 72.
See Aron Gurwitsch, “On Contemporary Nihilism,” The Review of Politics 7 (1945): 170–198. Reprinted inEssays in Memory ofAron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., and University Press of America, 1983), 523–550.
See Aron Gurwitsch, “On Contemporary Nihilism,” The Review of Politics 7 (1945): 170–198. Reprinted inEssays in Memory ofAron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., and University Press of America, 1983), 523–550., 524.
See Aron Gurwitsch, “On Contemporary Nihilism,” The Review of Politics 7 (1945): 170–198. Reprinted inEssays in Memory ofAron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., and University Press of America, 1983), 523–550..
See Aron Gurwitsch, “On Contemporary Nihilism,” The Review of Politics 7 (1945): 170–198. Reprinted inEssays in Memory ofAron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., and University Press of America, 1983), 526.
See Aron Gurwitsch, “On Contemporary Nihilism,” The Review of Politics 7 (1945): 170–198. Reprinted inEssays in Memory ofAron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., and University Press of America, 1983), 539.
See Aron Gurwitsch, “On Contemporary Nihilism,” The Review of Politics 7 (1945): 170–198. Reprinted inEssays in Memory ofAron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., and University Press of America, 1983), 529.
Lester Embree, “Notes on the Specification of ‘Meaning’ in Schutz,” Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences 14, no. 2–3 (July 1991): 207–218.
Lester Embree, “Notes on the Specification of ‘Meaning’ in Schutz,” Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences 14, no. 2–3 (July 1991): , 216.
Richard Grathoff, ed., The Theory of Social Action: The Correspondence ofAlfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 36.
Cf. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
Stanford M. Lyman, “Animal Faith, Puritanism, and the Schutz-Gurwitsch Debate: A Commentary” (paper presented at the Alfred Schutz Memorial Symposium, New School for Social Research, New York City, Nov. 30 — Dec. 1, 1989), in Human Studies 14, no. 2–3 (July 1991): 199–206. Quotation from p. 200.
Stanford M. Lyman, “Animal Faith, Puritanism, and the Schutz-Gurwitsch Debate: A Commentary” (paper presented at the Alfred Schutz Memorial Symposium, New School for Social Research, New York City, Nov. 30 — Dec. 1, 1989), in Human Studies 14, no. 2–3 (July 1991): 199–206. Quotation from p. 200.
Stanford M. Lyman, “Animal Faith, Puritanism, and the Schutz-Gurwitsch Debate: A Commentary” (paper presented at the Alfred Schutz Memorial Symposium, New School for Social Research, New York City, Nov. 30 — Dec. 1, 1989), in Human Studies 14, no. 2–3 (July 1991): 199–206. Quotation from p. 200..
See Martin Esslin, The Theatre of theAbsurd, rev. ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1969).
Richard Schechner, Public Domain: Essays on the Theatre (New York: Avon Books, 1969), 144–154 and passim.
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer(Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1959), 243–245. Quotation from p. 245.
Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northestern University Press, 1967), 139–214.
See Don H. Zimmerman and Melvin Pollner, “The Everyday World as Phenomenon,” in UnderstandingEveryday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge, ed. Jack D. Douglas (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1970), 80–103.
Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1951), 249–325, 480–535.
Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, Inc., 1979), 99–204.
Cf. Georg Simmel, “How is Society Possible?” in Georg Simmel, 1858–1918: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography, ed. Kurt H. Wolff(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), 337–356.
Peter McHugh, “On the Failure of Positivism,” in Douglas, Understanding Everyday Life, 320–335. Quotation from p. 335.
Cf. Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interaction: Perspective and Method (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 1–89.
Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, 21, 42–61.
Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 142–148.
Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, 43–44.
Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, 57.
Lyman and Scott, TheDrama ofSocial Reality, 1–3, 101–114, 159–162, 163–170.
Kenneth Burke, “Interaction: Dramatism,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 7 (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 446. See also Bernard L. Brock, ed., Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: Rhetoric in Transition (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995).
Cf. two studies by Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. GeoffBennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982–1985, trans. and ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Or, The End of the Social and OtherEssays, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 1–94.
Keith Tester, The Life and Times ofPost-Modernity (London: Routledge, 1993), 152.
Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H, Wolff (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950), 402–408. See also Margaret Mary Wood, The Stranger: A Study in Social Relationships (1934; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1969).
Robert E. Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” in Personality and the Social Group, ed. Ernest W. Burgess(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 64–77.
Everett V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1961).
H. F. Dickie-Clarke, The Marginal Situation: A Sociological Study of a Coloured Group (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); Sister Frances Jerome Woods, C.D.P., Marginality and Identity: A Colored Creole Family Through Ten Generations (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972); Noel P. Gist and Anthony Gary Dworkin, eds., The Blending of Races: Marginality and Identity in World Perspective (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1972); Noel P. Gist and Roy Dean Wright, Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially Mixed Minority in India (Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1973); Janice E. Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Abdolmaboud Ansari, Iranian Immigrants in the United States: A Case Study of Dual Marginality (Millwood, N.J.: Associated Faculty Press, 1988); John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 3 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1991-forthcoming). Sociological studies of Chinese in America have often focused on their marginality. See, e.g., Stanford M. Lyman, The Asian in North America (Santa Barbara: American Bibliographic Center-Clio Press, 1977), 11–66, 103–118, 151–200; Paul C. P. Siu, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation, ed. John Kuo Wei Tchen (New York: New York University Press, 1987); Robert Seto Quan in collaboration with Julian B. Roebuck, Lotus Among the Magnolias: The Mississippi Chinese (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982); James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, 2d ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1988).
See two works by Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), 4; Marginal Consciousness, ed. Lester Embree (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985).
Blumer, Symbolic Interaction, 10.
Blumer, Symbolic Interaction, 15.
Kenneth Bock, Human Nature Mythology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Kenneth Bock, Human Nature Mythology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 80.
Kenneth Bock, Human Nature Mythology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 113.
Kenneth Bock, Human Nature Mythology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 101–116.
Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 3–17.
Bock, Human Nature Mythology, 114.
Bock, Human Nature Mythology, 116.
Cf. Stephen Park Turner and Jonathan H. Turner, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis ofAmerican Sociology (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990).
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
McHugh, “On the Failures of Positivism,” 322–324.
Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, 77–108.
Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 357–394.
Burke, “Interaction: Dramatism.”
See Tom Burns, Erving Goffman (London: Routledge, 1992), 106–140.
Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1963), 122–150, 164–176.
Rom Harré, Social Being: A Theory for Social Psychology (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), 45–62, 189–232; R. Harré and P. F. Secord, The Explanation of Social Behaviour (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), 147–226; Peter Marsh, Elizabeth Rosser, and Rom Harré, The Rules of Disorder (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Rom Harré and Grant Gillett, The Discursive Mind (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 97–180.
In addition to Richard Schechner’s The Public Domain, see five studies by the same author: “Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance,” The Drama Review 17, no. 3 (September 1973): 5–36; Environmental Theater (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973); Essays on PerformanceTheory, 1970–1976 (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977); Richard Schechner and Mady Schuman, eds., Ritual, Play, and Performance: Readings in the Social Sciences/Theatre (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976); and Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).
See, among many others by the same author, Victor W. Turner, “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience,” in Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, eds., The Anthropology ofExperience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 33–44.
Nicolas Evreinoff, The Theatre in Life, ed. and trans. A. I. Nazaroff (1920; reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1970). See also Stanford M. Lyman, “Evreinoff, Our Contemporary” (in Japanese), Foreword to Evreinoff, Theatre in Life (in Japanese), trans. H. Shimizu (Tokyo: Shinyo-sha, 1983), 1–17.
Lyman and Scott, A Sociology of the Absurd, 21–190; The Drama of Social Reality, 1–3, 101–162. See also T. R. Young, The Drama of Social Life: Essays in Post-Modern Social Psychology (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 169–356.
For a brief but useful summary, see Christopher Lloyd, Explanation in Social History (Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1986), 263–278.
See Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered As a Text,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1971): 529–562.
Schechner, The Public Domain, 189–191, 222–225; Lyman and Scott, A Sociology of the Absurd, 61–68, 215–216.
Schechner, The Public Domain, 63–67.
Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structure, 181.
See Lyman and Scott, The Drama of Social Reality, 101–115. See also two studies by Alan F. Blum, “Theorizing,” in Douglas, Understanding Everyday Life, 305–323; and Theorizing (London: Heinemann, 1974).
Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structures, 52–76.
Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structures, 62.
Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structures., 109.
Alfred Schutz, “Lecture XVI: The Social Stratification of Language,” (Jan. 12, 1953), Problems of a Sociology of Language: A Lecture Course, ed. Lester Embree and Fred Kersten, Human Studies (forthcoming).
Alfred Schutz, “Lecture XVI: The Social Stratification of Language,” (Jan. 12, 1953), Problems of a Sociology of Language: A Lecture Course, ed. Lester Embree and Fred Kersten, Human Studies (forthcoming), 52.
Lyman and Scott, A Sociology of the Absurd, 2–20.
Schutz, “The Social Stratification of Language,” 50–52.
See Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291–322;
Patricia M. Lengermann and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley, “Feminist Sociological Theory: The Near-Future Prospects,” in Frontiers of Social Theory: The New Syntheses, ed. George Ritzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 316–344; and four works by Steven Seidman, “The End of Sociological Theory: The Postmodern Hope,” and “Postmodern Anxiety: The Politics of Epistemology,” Sociological Theory 9, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 131–146 and 180–190; Embattled Eros: Sexual Politics and Ethics in Contemporary America (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1–16, 97–144, 187–215; “Symposium: Queer Theory/Sociology: A Dialogue,” Sociological Theory 12, no. 2 (July 1994): 166–177. For a critique of Seidman’s version of postmodernism, see Stanford M. Lyman, “Without Morals or Mores: Deviance in Postmodern Social Theory,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 9, no. 2 (Winter 1995), 197–235.
Schutz, “The Social Stratification of Language,” 52.
Harré and Secord, 209–215.
See, of course, the classical statement of the twentieth-century crisis: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis ofEuropean Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
Maurice Natanson, “History as a Finite Province of Meaning,” in Natanson, Literature, Philosophy and the Social Sciences: Essays in Existentialism and Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1968), 172–177.
Maurice Natanson, “History as a Finite Province of Meaning,” in Natanson, Literature, Philosophy and the Social Sciences: Essays in Existentialism and Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1968), 172–177.
For a fascinating investigation that questions the postmodern critique insofar as it applies to law and jurisprudence in the West, see Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
For four studies of how the law and the courts are engaged in the construction and legitimation of Otherhood, see Stanford M. Lyman, “The Race Question and Liberalism: Casuistries in American Constitutional Law,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 5, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 183–247; “The Chinese Before the Courts: Ethnoracial Construction and Marginalization,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 6, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 443–462; “Marginalizing the Self: A Study of Citizenship, Color, and Ethnoracial Identity in American Society,” Symbolic Interaction 16, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 379–394; and “Chinese Seeking Justice in the Courts of the United States: A Constitutional Interpretation,” in Origins and Destinations: 41 Essays on Chinese America, ed. Munson Kwok et al. (Los Angeles: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1994), 41–77.
Michael D. Barber, Social Typifications and the Elusive Other: The Place of Sociology of Knowledge in A fred Schutz ‘s Phenomenology (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1988), 100.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lyman, S.M. (1998). Dramas, Narratives, and the Postmodern Challenge. In: Embree, L. (eds) Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature”. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9042-6_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9042-6_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4947-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9042-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive