Emile Zola, The Experimental Novel

Emile Zola

The Experimental Novel

Thesis: Emile Zola in The Experimental Novel treats literature as a science, that literature is in fact a study of the effect of individual on society and effect of society on an individual.

· Emile Zola (1840-1902) was one France’s great novelists

o Wrote a famous letter in 1898 in defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus

o Description of Paris Slums made him famous both as a social critic and a literary innovator

· Emile Zola uses physiology to explain how science explains how man works from the mechanism of the organs.

· Emile continues that man is also influenced by society and his social condition.

· That literature is the study of the individual’s effect on society and the effect of society on the individual.

· Science wants to explain these conditions to be purely physical and chemical which aids him in finding the laws which govern them easily

· What constitutes the experimental novel:

o To posses a knowledge of the mechanism of the phenomena inherent in man

o To show the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under the influences of heredity and environment

o To exhibit man living in social conditions produced by himself, which he modifies daily, and in the heart of which he himself experiences a continual transformation

· We learn to use science to solve scientifically the question of how men behave when they are in society.

· The experimental novel is a consequence of the scientific evolution of the century.

· The metaphysical man is dead; our whole territory is transformed by the advent of the physiological man.

· We have become experimentalists instead of philosophers

· The experimental method in letters, as in the sciences, in on the way to explain the natural phenomena, both individual and social, of which metaphysics, until now, has given only irrational and supernatural explanations.