The writer in his time: Socio-economic influences in the literary work

Inaugural lecture, 18 October 1984, delivered at the University of South Africa, Pretoria

ISBN O 620 08042 6

Extract from the opening lines:

One of the most striking studies in the history of criticism in recent years is Lucien Goldmann's essay on Robbe-Grillet, the father, so to speak, of the Nouveau Roman: the new novel. In this essay, Goldmann tries to relate the clinical, hyper-objective descriptions of Robbe-Grillet to the overwhelming subjection of modern man in a situation which reduces him to the passivity or to the paralysis of a "voyeur". Goldmann's attempt reveals the perspicacity reached by a sociological approach to literature in the 20th Century in retracing the roots of a literary work to its milieu. While this type of analysis has been widely developed recently, there is a complementary one that takes the apparently opposite standpoint - that a work of art has a prophetic function. This stance is embodied in the Russian poet Ossip Mendelstam's study on Dante's Divina Corrnnedia, written in 1925. Scholars insist in relating Dante to his time and Mendelstam follows suit, but he also analyses the range of Dante's imagination, which, though thoroughly irrnnersed in the material world surrounding him, reaches dynamically beyond it, to give us a vision of what could be of the possible, and develops to its full extent the potential of the forms and being; of his world.