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The Omega Phenomenon: The Social Infrastructure, Interpersonal Choice and the Social Periphery
(1991)
The Acknowledgement of Literary Influence: A Structural Analysis of a German Literary Network
(1991)
This paper analyzes a characteristic syndrome of modern literature identified as “anxiety of influence” by literary critics and as “mania for originality” by art historians. Based on a sociological reformulation of the syndrome as it relates to the structure of acknowledged influence, the paper develops and tests several hypotheses. Data are based on a survey of West German writers and are analyzed by using clustering techniques and correspondence analysis. First, the analysis demonstrates the fragmented and non-hierarchical structure of acknowledged literary influence. Second, the different types of influence (absence distinctiveness, and clusterability) correspond to different professional and literary characteristics of writers. Results highlight one of the contradictions between the cultural code and the professional structure of modern art: at the level of ideology, greatness and genius are equated with the absence of influence and artistic uniqueness. The analysis shows, however, that the denial/absence of acknowledged influence is found among writers who are excluded from the professional networks where reputations are made in the world of literature.
The lives of writers are subject to a variety of myths. This article shows that such cultural perceptions of writers bear a close affinity to the social structure of literature in modern societies. Two structural properties seem to encourage the proliferation of myths about writers: (1) the existence of a group of prominent writers who occupy unique social positions and form an amorphous elite and (2) the relation between the elite and the large group of lesser-known, peripheral writers. Elite amorphousness and high relational density among the elite and peripheral "groupness" and sparseness of literary relations among the periphery emerge as two major properties of the social structure. These counterintuitive properties are useful in understanding myth generation in literature; they allow for competing "views" of the social structure, views that seem to develop into contradictory myths of the modern writer. Data on several types of ties among writers were collected and analyzed with block model techniques.
The paper describes how the non-profit sector in East Germany has passed through several distinct phases in recent years. It shows how the role of the non-profit sector under the system of party dominance and centralised economic and social planning signified a major contradiction of East German society: the artificial under-development of civic society in eastern Europe's most successful economy. During the first phase of the transition period in late 1989, the expression and manifestation of political views was predominant. With the disintegration of the socialist party-state, the needs for social service provision increased. West German organisations have increasingly become the dominant factor in East German non-profit sector affairs. The paper argues that the East German non-profit sector will emerge as a slightly poorer and more secular version of its West German counterpart.