Pavel Arsenyev.
Literary Positivism. Season One: 1836–1851. Issue Two: Comte and the Aesthetics of Positivism / Balzac and the Social Sciences
The second installment in an essayistic series dedicated to the genre of the physiological sketch.
The genre of the physiological sketch originated in France in the first half of the nineteenth century. This remarkable socio-literary phenomenon is an excellent example of how, in the industrial era, the pen was transformed into a new kind of microscope. Armed with it, writers began to study people in much the same way as biologists examine insects.
Photos: Anna Zavozyaeva
Pavel Arsenyev (b. 1986) is a poet and literary theorist, and the recipient of the Andrei Bely Prize (2012).
…Early realist prose and “positive” science, including sociology, share a number of family resemblances. These include the stage preceding writing, devoted to the collection of empirical material, its classification, and, finally, the organisation of facts into a strictly descriptive—rather than “captivating”—narrative. In the absence of a developed philosophical tradition, as well as of a positivist academic science, the Naturalism may well have anticipated Russian sociology.
Pavel Arsenyev analyses the stylistic features of this new literary genre, and considers the historical context of its emergence, including the rise of mass print culture and the state regulation of the French press, both of which directly influenced the development of the “physiologies.” The two most important figures in this installment’s discussion of literary positivism are the writer Honoré de Balzac—who openly borrowed methodologies from the natural sciences in his depiction of social customs—and the sociologist Auguste Comte, an intellectual ally of literary figures and one of the first to propose that society itself should become an object of scientific analysis.
Scientific Editors
Irina Adelheim
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Editor
Vyacheslav Nemirov
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