Literature, music, and the mutual tuning-in relationship

Michael McDuffie

pp. 89-111

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

Abstract

Schutz's lecture on the "Sociological Aspect of Literature" explores the social relationships between beholders and authors of literature; these social orientations provide the pre-communicative basis for any exchange of meaning through literature. In this chapter, Schutz's lecture on literature is examined in the context of his phenomenology of musical experience; in the latter, Schutz identifies the "mutual tuning-in relationship " as the sociological precondition for any form of communication, including that which is accomplished by means of literary texts. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to clarify the manner in which beholders of literature tune-in to various literary art forms, as the precondition for their understanding of the literary work.

Cited authors

Schütz Alfred