Flaubert's Point of View

The break necessary to establish a rigorous science of cultural works is something more and something else than a simple methodological reversal.' It implies a true conversion of the ordinary way of thinking and living the intellectual enterprise. It is a matter of breaking the narcissistic relationship inscribed in the representation of intellectual work as a "creation" and which excludes as the expression par excellence of "reductionist sociology" the effort to subject the artist and the work of art to a way of thinking that is doubly objectionable since it is both genetic and generic. It would be easy to show what the most different kinds of analysis of the work of art owe to the norms that require treating works in and for themselves, with no reference to the social conditions of their production. Thus in the now-classic Theory of Literature, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren seem to advocate "an explanation in terms of the personality and the life of the writer." In fact, because they (no doubt along with most of their readers) accept the ideology of the "man of genius" they are committed, in their own terms, to "one of the oldest and best-established