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Modern literature, viewed superficially, presents two phenomena that attest its vitality rather than its decline, at least in our Vestern countries: the anormal development of the novel and the advent of criticism as a genre.
The novel today appears to be omniscient and does not always succeed in disguising its didactic intent. Formerly, the various disciplines—once their methods were acquired and their end discerned—detached themselves from literature, leaving to it exclusively the domain of fiction. Devoured by the voracity of the novel, not only the young and as yet uncertain sciences such as psychoanalysis, ethnology, and criminology, but older ones as well, like philosophy, history or law, come back to it and use it readily in maintaining their theses and in emphasizing their needs. Thus the novel takes over their diverse ambitions.
1. Kritische Essays zur europäische Literatur (Bern, A. Francke, 1950); French ed.: Essais sur la Littérature européenne (last chapter: Remarque sur le Roman français) (Paris, Grasset, 1954).
2. Puissance du Roman (Marseille, 1942).
3. Three times as long in this, its second edition (Gallimard, 1954) as in the first (1936).
4. It is rather noteworthy that some special studies terminate with conclusions quite similar to those of Weidlé. For instance, Yanette Delétang-Tardif who, in Les Romans d'Edmond Jaloux (Paris, La Table Ronde, 1948), studied the dramatic and psychological forces that animate these works, also is led to explore the deterioration of the novel of character-portrayal as contrasted with easier or more fast-moving kinds of fiction. Above all, she reproaches the modern novel for its almost complete lack of romantic invention, its lack of composition and "its general tendency to become increasingly indifferent to any symphonic and architectural pursuit."
5. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
6. "Collection Etre et Penser" (Neuchâtel, Editions de la Baconnière, 1945).
7. Paris, Gallimard, 1953
8. Op. cit., p. 84.
9. Gallimard, 1948.
10. Buenos Aires, Editorial Losada, 1951.
11. Paris, Gallimard, 1953.
12. La Grâce d'écrire, Chap. I, p. 19, "Sur la Condition littéraire" (Paris, Gallimard, 1955).
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