Reading Charles Taylor’s new book on romantic poetry reminded me how interesting it is that Novalis, the German romantic poet, offered a maxim which has come to define the sensibility of generations of qualitative sociologists, summarised here by Ash Watson:
The maxim of ‘making the familiar strange’ seems so central to contemporary sociology it is commonly misattributed to Mills.3 Its earliest penning can be found in the unpublished notebooks of the German Romantic poet Novalis from the late 1700s (Beiser, 1998; Gunderson, 2020), and traced through much art and philosophy, including T. S. Eliot and the Russian formalists, before the notion was taken up within ethnographic and qualitative research (Myers, 2011). Mills’ most overt contribution to this tradition is his claim that, upon acquiring a sociological imagination, people may ‘come to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar’ (1959, p. 4). More recently, scholars like Dawn Mannay (2010) have focused on this idea while considering how to tackle the blind spots of familiarity. Victoria Foster (2019) charts methodological ways of ‘making the ordinary strange’ by drawing together sociology and surrealism. Ryan Gunderson (2020) has also given this attention, exploring the depths and complexities of making the familiar strange as a sociological process of ‘social defamiliarisation’. Doing this, Gunderson (2020, p. 10) draws on Bauman’s (1990, p. 15) view that sociology involves asking questions which ‘defamiliarise the familiar’ so to show a social world ‘to be just one of the possible ways, not the one and only, not the “natural”, way of life’.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380261221109031?journalCode=sora
Here’s a paraphrase of the original unpublished fragment, which has been widely reproduced as if it were the original
To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite
https://archive.org/details/frederick-c.-beiser-the-romantic-imperative-the-concept-of-early-german-romanticism/page/207/mode/2up?q=familiar
This is the original source which I can’t access: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110950649-034/html?lang=de 😡
But isn’t it interesting there’s a direct line romantic poetry to qualitative sociology? Riffing off Chris Smith, I wonder how many qualitative sociologists are aware of this sacred project underpinning their work?
Mark Carrigan 