Abstract

This article, conceived as a map, is devoted to shed light on the ways literature plays a role in the sociologists' experience: as a type of expression, when sociologists rely on it in order to give life to their concepts and theories; when they turn to literature for its ability to carry peculiar elements and mechanisms on which the functioning of different societies is based; as a source of knowledge, for instance, devoted at sustaining sociologists' research on past societies, then far from their direct observation; and so on. At the base of this article, the assumption that literature shares with sociology some form of orientation to knowledge, though based on different methods and criteria of taking responsibility, and that sociologists have the opportunity to fruitfully rearticulate their ways to observe their objects of study by meeting «literary knowledge».