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Chapter Five
Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mystères de Paris
Terms such as 'the sociological study of literature' or 'the sociology of literature' often serve, and have served in the past, to indicate sometimes quite opposite lines of research. One can take a literary work simply as documentary evidence of a historical period; one can consider the social element as the explanatory cause of the aesthetic solution adopted for a literary work; finally, one can invent a dialectic between two points of view (the work as an aesthetic phenomenon and society as its explanatory context) in which, on the one hand, the social element explains each aesthetic choice that has been made and, on the other, a study of the work and of its structural features leads to a clearer understanding of the state of a society. 1
Of what use, in this third method we envisage, is the kind of semiotic research which examines narrative structures? If the description of the work as a system of signs helped us to shed an absolutely 'neutral' and 'objective' light on its structures (leaving aside the complex of meanings that history continually attributes to the work as message), then even the social context would be excludedif only temporarilyfrom this semiological study. And with it would go that ideological nucleus which the whole work implies. But this singleness of approach to the research only appears feasible. In point of fact, we cannot select and isolate (or, in other words, emphasize or make prominent) any formal element without attributing to itat least implicitlyfurther significance. Insofar as the
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"Eugène Sue, il socialismo e la consolazione," introduction to E. Sue, I misteri di Parigi (Milan: Sugar, 1965). English translation as "Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mystères de Paris," International Social Sciences Journal 14, no. 4 (1967). This chapter is a revised version of the translation.

 
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