The familiar strange of sociological fiction. Issue 4 (July 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Watson, Ash
• Is Part Of: Sociological review. Volume 70:Issue 4(2022)
• Page Start: 723
• Page End: 732
• Publication Date: 2022-07
• Subjects: creative writing -- distillation -- familiar strange -- Gabriel García Márquez -- literature -- sociological fiction -- sociological imagination; Sociology -- Periodicals; 301
• DOI: 10.1177/00380261221109031
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0038-0261

Abstract

Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude makes the magical and strange feel familiar, and short stories from Fiction @ The Sociological Review inversely make the familiar feel strange. I consider this ability to make the familiar strange as a key part of having a sociological sense of the world: as an ability to disturb what seems fixed and settled in society, and unmake any given set of social relations as the only and natural way of life. I conceptualise the crafting of this sense in fiction as a process of distillation. When writing sociological fiction, we distil our disciplinary attunement – strip down, concentrate and refine the many concepts and findings of our work – to craft scenes which unsettle 'common sense'.