Literature as Cultural Practice and Social Experience
Literary Images and Repertoires of Imagination
This project is a study of the forms and mechanisms through which literature can influence people's lives. Although Russia is considered a literature-centric country, the influence of literature on life is too subtle and diverse to be reliably ‘dissected’ in a purely positivistic manner or reduced to cultural consumption practices. In our study, we believe that the impact of reading on people's lives is not limited to the passive assimilation of a cultural canon; reading is first and foremost a social process around which people construct their identities, social ties, and even their occupations.
With this in mind, we turn to the study of various social practices related to literature. This concerns not only reading itself, but also participation in certain circles (fandoms), turning to the practices of writing, including amateur prose and poetry (in some cases, professionalisation of this activity), and the formation of certain taste, style, and value preferences, which are transmitted far beyond immediate reading practices. Expanding the framework, we aim to identify the key elements of the involvement and influence of literature on life, and the characteristics of people of different socio-demographic characteristics and ages.
The implementation of the project will make it possible to answer the following questions:
What is the relationship between literary preferences and reading practices in the family, at school, and in the immediate social environment? How do literature and related social practices influence value orientations, ideas about the right life trajectory, and career choices?
Books and Life
The literature-centric quality of a culture has quite concrete, observable and measurable manifestations. First of all, it is important to understand the scale of ‘coverage’ of different social groups by key literary genres and samples. In the first, simplest approximation, this coverage is characterised by familiarity with literary samples and evaluative judgments of the most general nature, reflecting interest, reading experience, emotional involvement, and basic dispositions judgments.
Since the question of how literature relates to identity in the dynamic aspect of its formation, as well as to ways of living (decision-making, evaluative judgments, etc) is a priority, one of the priority cohorts is young people who have just received their first professional education and are beginning their work and life journey. This is the period of life when the ‘density’ of decisions with far-reaching consequences is usually particularly high: people are building a career, creating a family, and forming a lifestyle. Therefore, the TrEC cohort longitudinal study, which contains detailed data on the life course of a nationally representative sample of Russian youth over the past nine years, is a promising information base for solving this problem.
The implementation of the project will make it possible to answer the following questions:
How, how much, and what exactly do young Russians read? How does this relate to the way they structure their lives and careers? How does the current profile of literary practices of Russian youth fit into the international context and what measuring tools and indicators are used in foreign studies?