Kontext ›Gesellschaft‹. Literarische Kommunikation – Semantik – Strukturgeschichte

Abstract

This article is concerned with the question of what we mean by contextualizing a literary text in terms of social history. What are we setting a text in relation to if we assign ›society as a context‹ to it? And what is the nature of this relation? An attempt is made to answer the first question by defining society as communication. The article teases out the forms of communication that can be understood as a ›text‹ and those that can be understood as a social ›context‹. The second question picks up what is known as the Vermittlungsproblem (correlation problem)that is, the problem, for which a solution is not believed to have been found, of how to theoretically model the relationship between text and context. In the final part of the article, this problem is steered toward a conceptual solution by distinguishing between different kinds of context (communication setting, the problem at stake, cultural knowledge, communication situation).The article begins with a brief historical outline of the field, which takes us back to the origins of the concept of »social history« in the history of scholarship. The characteristic innovation of the sozialgeschichtliche Literaturwissenschaft (sociohistorical literary studies) advocated in the 1970s and 1980s is identified as its attempt to arrive, drawing on contemporary models of structural sociology, at a more complex social theory than had been used by the earlier sociology of literature shaped by Marxism and ideological criticism. This led to two problems that were still to be satisfactorily solved in the 1980s. First, it seemed as though the sociological models could be used to describe only ›literature as social system‹, but not ›literature as symbolic system‹, because the sociological concept of action was unable to capture the special features of literary activity. Second, the starting point for theoretically conceptualizing the relation between literary ›text‹ and social ›context‹ was the special historical case of an autonomous system of art in a society where it was functionally distinct, which meant that the scope of the sociohistorical paradigm was confined to literature from the modern period.Both these problems, the present article suggests, can be solved by applying the model of sociocultural evolution that was developed above all by Niklas Luhmann and following it through to its logical conclusion. The first stage in showing this more clearly is to provide a vertical outline of literary communication, in other words to ask how, out of the totality of social communication events,