Alfred Schutz's interpretation of Cervantes's don Quixote and his microsociological view on literature

Martin Endreß

pp. 113-128

in: Lester Embree (ed), Alfred Schutz's "sociological aspect of literature", Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

This essay relates Schutz's sketch on the "Sociological Aspect of Literature" to his analysis of Cervantes's novel Don Quixote for biographical and theoretical reasons. It shows that the various forms of social relationship experienced by Don Quixote on his three expeditions are taken as interaction modes of different situations of reception by Schutz in order to characterize different types of literary art forms. This idea of an analogous construction of intersubjective modes of reality construction and the classic triadic model of literary art forms (poetry, drama, and the novel) makes Schutz a predecessor of the modern "reader-response theory."

Cited authors

Schütz Alfred