La littérature et son histoire du point de vue des savants : un dialogue entre Georges Cuvier et Alexander von Humboldt (1800-1845)

Anne-Gaëlle Robineau-Weber (1)

1 TEXTES ET CULTURES - Textes et Cultures

The aim of this article is to moderate and differentiate reiterated statements on the division between science and literature from the early nineteenth century onwards. The article thus examines how two scientists, representing different practices of natural history in the first half of the nineteenth century, came to develop criteria of ‘literariness’ and ‘scientificity’ by considering the need or the ineffectiveness of such a division. Three successive points illustrate this argument : both scholars criticised travelogues as being too literary and not pertaining to the realm of scholarly discourse (Humboldt considered them as texts that needed to renew their poetics in order to claim any hermeneutic value) ; Cuvier and Humboldt, constrained to delve into forms they considered as literary, began to think of poetic rules based on scientific practice ; both scholars asserted their desire to build histories of literature in terms of its relationship with scholarly discourse and practice.

Domaines: Littératures

Anne-Gaëlle Robineau-Weber. La littérature et son histoire du point de vue des savants : un dialogue entre Georges Cuvier et Alexander von Humboldt (1800-1845). Bibliothèque comparatiste de la SFLGC, 2010. ⟨hal-03770665⟩