EXPANDING THE LITERARY HORIZON - ROMANTIC POETS AND POSTMODERN SOCIOLOGISTS

Although literary devices help postmodern sociologists distinguish the ir own perspectives from those of their subjects, literary borrowing a lso threatens to reduce the sociologist's perspective to one among man y equivalent fictions. I argue that we can diminish this threat by exp anding our notion of what literature can do. Current literary borrowin gs follow the institutionalized practice of separating literary from e xplanatory discourse, but pre-institutionalized precedents show that l iterature can serve to conceptualize situated behavior. I analyze one such precedent in the work of the poet John Keats (1795-1821), who for mulated an almost Meadian interaction theory. Keats's use of unrealist ic elements and an identifiable point of view to deploy them in his te xts suggests ways in which sociologists might adapt literary conceptua lization to foreground their understanding of the behavior they study.