Doxa och debatt. Litteraturvetenskap kring sekelskiftet 2000

Abstract

AbstractThe prime purpose of the present dissertation is to show what constitutes doxa within the field of Swedish literary scholarship at the turn-of-millenium 2000, coupled to a discussion of what aspects of the doxa are currently under debate. Another purpose has been to explain why a particular doxa proves resistant to change or renegotiation. I use doxa in the sense developed by Pierre Bourdieu: it is thus a quiet article of faith and furthermore something taken for granted ; it is implicit but can be rendered explicit. It is in the heat of debate and by way of debate analysis that the doxa manifests itself and appears as doxa. Discussions concerning literary scholarship or battles over what kind of discipline Comparative Literature is and ought to be are conducted within several fora, in formal debates, textbook chapters, and significantly in reviews of dissertations and other relevant scientific works within the disciplinary journals Samlaren ( The Collector ) and Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap ( Journal of Literary Scholarship ) as well as in the daily press. My material consists of texts or selections from texts of metadisciplinary character. My presentation of the doxa of literary scholarship is structured by the two parameters which constitute the subject s common definition, i.e. literary and scholarship. My results indicate that the doxa pertaining to choice of study objects corresponds to a narrow conception of literature, essentially a literature of the cultivated classes.The doxa of proper scholarship is more multi-facted. Its most important feature which in effect gives the discipline its identity is the doxa of reading. Literary scholarship revolves around what may be called professional close reading. I have found this textual-analytical perspective to form the core of Comparative Literature. Among those seldom discussed or questioned are such traditional, embedded virtues as scientific method and the doxa of authorial restraint, which latter I have called the norm of impersonality.My review of debates concerning current Swedish literary scholarship shows that the latter s adherent doxa is strong; it proves generally resistant to change but may nevertheless slowly evolve into something new. The doxa has been challenged by those who have been able to estrange the familiar and the normbound. Both the status quo and attempts at renegotiations of current doxa can be understood and explained by way of the sociologist Ludwik Fleck s term thought collective. Keywords: literature, science, doxa, controversy, gender, Pierre Bourdieu, Samlaren, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, conception of literature, Ludwik Fleck, thought collective.