Contenu du sommaire : Savoirs de la littérature

A ‘halfway reality' : Literary exemplarities and scientific generalizations in nineteenth-century France The kind of comparative history of literature and social sciences proposed here does not focus on textual forms, documentary content or collective representations, but rather on the level of abstraction at which literary as well as scientific descriptions operate in the nineteenth century. Picturesque, nomological, typological : the study of these three historical forms of generalization shows that some novels are closer in many ways to works by historians or statisticians than to the productions of other novelists of the time. And yet, among these three epistemological “families”, there remains differences between literary ambitions and scholarly criteria : analyzing them explains why the realist novel of the nineteenth century has exerted such an enduring fascination on social scientists.

Literary mimesis and moral knowledge : The tradition of “ethopoiia” The aim of the article is to explore the cognitive value of certain literary works through the notion of “ethopoiia” (moral mimesis). Originally a rhetorical notion, “ethopoiia” may be developed into a transversal literary genre, ideally situated at the crossroads between literature and knowledge, which may be practiced by any of the “moral sciences”–history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.–which approach human reality through the phenomenological representation of ethos (character/custom, either individual or collective). Having illustrated the theoretical framework of Ethopoiia, I will discuss the development of this long-standing “moralistic” tradition through a number of significant examples from the Western canon, from Aristotle and Theophrastus down to the realist novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stressing continuities and discontinuities, and focusing on the relationship between literature and the human sciences.

Thinking the cosmos in the seventeenth century : Fiction, hypothesis and astronomy from Kepler to Huygens This article offers an account of the ways in which astronomers used fiction in the great age of telescopic discovery. The aim is to reinterpret the relation between fiction and astronomy, using close readings of the literary techniques in the works of Johannes Kepler and Christiaan Huygens. Recent historians of the telescope such as Albert van Helden have rightly argued that observatory work remained a private occupation, and was thus hard to present as public knowledge. The analysis presented here explains the need for such astronomical work to be linked with various forms of fiction : by constructing narratives of displacement and journeying, in which specially qualified delegates were imagined as travelling between Earth and space, the verisimilitude of Copernicanism could be developed.

What sort of science for what sort of democracy ? Lu Xun and his fiction in the May Fourth movement The May Fourth movement of 1919 is generally associated with calls by activists like Chen Duxiu in support of “Mr Science and Mr Democracy.” However, their theories often remain within the framework of a scientistic and instrumental understanding of science, leading directly from Social Darwinism to Marxism. On the other hand, the call to literature as a vector for the “new thinking” resulted in a distinct current of thought that can be associated with writer Lu Xun. This essay attempts to show how, in his fiction, Lu Xun rejected the instrumentalisation both of literature and of the knowledge on human society that it encapsulates. Turning away from both moralism and biological culturalism, Lu Xun discussed the difficulties encountered by democracy in China by analyzing the social mechanisms through which individual autonomy was repeatedly repressed. By virtue of this epistemological turn, and of his systematic attention to the reflexive position of the writer as an observer of social reality, Lu Xun can be considered as a pioneer in the emergence of a discourse of modern social sciences in China.

Julien Gracq : The work of History Novelist Julien Gracq constructed throughout his work an elaborate reflection on History, as confronting his fiction with his later writing shows. This article first examines Gracq's taste for History, and the place of historical experience in his writing. As Vincent Descombes suggested for Proust, it is in his novels, more than his theoretical musings, that Gracq exhibited the depth of his thinking : his use of figures of temporality and his writing of change underpinned, in his fiction, his staging of wait/expectancy, and events, paradoxically presented through recollection. What will happen is always already known : through writing, Gracq attempted to encapsulate the effect the determinism of History had on individuals and societies. Then, this article puts Gracq's work in the larger context of contemporary debates, among historians on the concept of the “event”, and among sociologists and philosophers on time and its perception : in this perspective, Gracq's books can be understood as a contribution to our understanding of History and historicity.

Possible memories of history and “to-day” literature : On transcription of history in contemporary novel This article sets out to investigate those aspects of the contemporary novel in which fiction writing delves into the ghost pains of history and experiments with its would-be memories. Two sets of complementary examples will allow us to shed light on this particular novelistic ambition, i.e. transcribing history into a “to-day” (or “now-time”, to use a phrase coined by Walter Benjamin) experimentation with its virtual memories. The first set of texts (by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Jonathan Littell) illustrates the reinvention of the executioner's memory courtesy of a narrator passing himself for a double of the historian. The second series of novels (by David Albahari, Aleksandar Hemon and Dubravka Ugrešić) features several attempts to grasp the historical quality of present times at the articulation of melancholy and irony. Despite the dangers of falling into the traps of a misguided rivalry or a troubling confusion between historiographical discourse and fictional narrative, and thus risking the reader's rejection for its perceived lack of legitimacy, contemporary fiction nonetheless sets its dwelling place in the folds of historical science while enlisting its own specific attributes in order to achieve a palimpsest-like writing of the virtual, or even the ideal text of historical experience.

“Literature as an assault against borders” : Reflections on the uneasiness of historians towards the new literary season in France Are novelists becoming historians nowadays ? Journalists and literary critics hotly debated this question throughout the 2009 “literary fall season”. This paper aims at analyzing the discourses which highlighed a conflict of borders between professional historians and novelists. In this perspective, the reception of Yannick Haenel's novel, Jan Karski, is of particular interest. My article describes the various aspects of the controversy on Jan Karski, which raised the delicate issue of the representation of the Holocaust in literature and on-screen. Beyond the conflicting temporalities of storytelling and memory, my purpose is to understand the embarrassment of historians with novels with historical content. It originated from their fight against denialism in the 1980s, which encouraged them to consider themselves as vigilant guardians of the border between fiction and reality, which their own writing practices and their epistemology undermine at the same time.