On Robert Escarpit’s Literary Sociology Critic Theory And Methodology

Robert Escarpit is a representative figure of the study on Positivist Literature Sociology in the mid-20th century of France. His critical theory had attracted much attention since its birth. Escarpit was deeply influenced by the trend of traditional literary sociology. It is a general trend to use sociological theory to carry on literary research from Madame de Stael’s Dualism to Gustave Lanson ’s Positivist Historicism. After Taine,Positivism Sociology had become an important guiding ideology in study of Literature Sociology of France, and the Bordeaux literary sociology school was a representative school that followed the ideology. As a leader of the school, Escarpit centered on the relationship between literature and society, reestablished the philosophy of literature and literature study object, integrated literary criticism and positivism sociology to carry out the study of positivist literature sociology. He thought that literature contains sociality.Literature research cannot be limited to writer or work, but should include all kinds of social facts which are composed of people, society and literature.Escarpit divided literary facts into three closely related sections, they were literature production, literature communication and literature consumption, accordingly, each of them had a subject,they were author, work and reader,which were chosen as study cutting points. Specifically, in literature production, Escarpit studied writers’ generation,changes of writers’ literary productivity,writers’ group phenomenon and economic problems respectively from two aspects of era and society; in literature communication,Escarpit focused on book publishing, function of publishing house and differences between literary circles; in section of literature consumption, Escarpit paid much attention on readers’ reading behavior, reading state and reading environment. Escarpit’s criticism didn’t involve specific content of literature works, but emphasized on characteristics of literature as communication and as institution. Through statistical methods, survey laws and other means, Escarpit collected literary fact samples, from which he showed social impacts on literature and found social development laws with a critical eye.Escarpit’s theory got involved in research field that was not achieved by predecessors and formed a relatively complete theoretical system. Since then, it had been hard for the following literary sociology studies to surpass this theoretical framework of production, communication and consumption. Of course, his theory was still not comprehensive enough, some part of which looked like a little insubstantial because of its excessive pursuit of empirical evidence. In addition, that his content did not involve contents of literary works was often criticized. However, Escarpit thought that, literary sociology criticism could never explain internal essence of literary creation, or provide eternal and universal standard of "beauty", but would intend to provide a social and historical perspective for past literary history, simultaneously, bring solutions that closer to reality for modem literature’s imbalanced development.