Leo Lowenthal, "Sociology of Literature in Retrospect"

Translated and published in Critical Inquiry in 1987, but given in 1981; this is a precis of an intellectual autopbiography. Makes interesting reading after the much earlier essays. LL has apparently continued on the same tracks, though with increasing sophistication...still, all of the studies he reviews are of the large-scale sociology that one, after all, naturally associates with the Frankfurt School. Of interest: an assertion, following Adorno, of the reality of art, without descent into New Criticism--the study of the literary in itself is one of the individual writer's transcendance of ideological and historical context. (This is then recaptured by capital through the dumbing-down of Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, etc. into ahistorical love stories).