From Flaubert to Proust Author: [France] Antoine Compagnon Translator: Gong Mi Publisher: Life·Reading·New Knowledge Sanlian Bookstore

※How do changes in the academic power structure affect the basic features of academic research?

※A panoramic view of the Republic of Letters during the Third Republic period, and a history of the establishment of the liberal arts system in modern universities

※ Sociology, education, literary history, history...Restore the birth scenes of a number of modern disciplines and the changes in academic power behind them

Literary research has been a long-standing pursuit, but “literary history” as a university education is not innate. Its birth was accompanied by a rise and fall of academic power.

Since 1850, "history" as a discipline has become independent from historical literature. Historians have quickly seized the right to speak in the French intellectual community and have become the main force in promoting the reform of secondary and higher education. The separation of church and state and educational reform in France at the end of the 19th century led to the establishment of comprehensive universities. Before that, "literary research" belonging to classical humanities was dominated by rhetoric. From then on, under the leadership of historians, literary research broke away from the appearance of playing with words and was placed in the relationship between history and society. Almost at the same time, "sociology" as a discipline began to emerge in universities, and the sociology branch of "pedagogy" was also born at this time. Lanson is to literary history as Durkheim is to sociology. As two emerging disciplines at that time, both tried to drive a wedge between literature/history and philosophy/history to open up space for themselves.

This book attempts to depict a panoramic picture of the French "Republic of Scholars" from the Franco-Prussian War to the 1920s and 1930s, that is, the period from "Flaubert to Proust". A large amount of historical materials connects the grievances and feuds between the French and German intellectual circles under the French Third Republic, the separation and integration of history and literature, the ideological spectrum presented by the Dreyfus Affair, and the group portraits of French scholars active at the turn of the century, such as Lanson, Durkheim, Sainte-Beuve, and Lucien Febvre. In a sense, "The Third Republic of Literature" can even be read as an ideal modern novel.

Antoine Compagnon is an important contemporary French literary critic and scholar of literary research. He is a professor at the Center for French and Comparative Literature Studies at the Sorbonne University, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a professor at the Collège de France, and a member of the European Academy of Sciences. His main research areas are modern French literature and theory. He is also the author of The Specters of Theory, Five Paradoxes of Modernity, and Anti-Modernism.