Gustave Lanson (French pronunciation:[ɡystavlɑ̃sɔ̃]; 5 August 1857 – 15 December 1934) was a Frenchhistorian andliterary critic. He taught at theSorbonne and theÉcole Normale Supérieure inParis. A dominant figure in French literary criticism, he influenced several generations of writers and critics through his teachings, which were anti-systematic and promoted a scrupulous and erudite approach to texts via extensive firsthand research, inventorying, and in-depth historical investigation.[1]
Lanson was a major figure in the reformation of the French university system at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as a dominant force in French literary criticism until well after his death. He is known primarily for his writings onliterary history, particularly his attempts to fuse the studies ofliterature and ofculture; in the former area he expanded upon, and in part questioned, the idea of "race, milieu, and moment" as described byHippolyte Taine. He also contributed a great deal to the study ofpedagogy, arguing for the pedagogical importance of theexplication de texte, the French predecessor ofclose reading. Among his shorter works is a still-authoritative 1892 life of the French poetNicolas Boileau-Despreaux in the seriesLes Grands Ecrivains Francais.
Lanson proposed the idea of "literary sociology," a complex formulation of the relationship between social influences on an author, readers' expectations, and thetext. For Lanson a text was neither a mere product of collective social forces nor an autonomous work by an autonomous genius, but something in between. The text was a composite work on which society exerted powerful and unseen forces but that could still escape those forces in order to present something outside of them: perhaps a hope or fantasy of something better. The composite nature of Lanson's model allowed him to imagine a text with multiple intended audiences: the immediate readership of the society that produced it, and another, ideal one that could be partially conditioned by the text itself.
In 1911 Lanson was a visiting professor atColumbia University inNew York City. During this period he travelled extensively in theUnited States, visiting a number of college campuses, and later wrote about his experiences. Lanson was struck by the importance ofreligion on American campuses, though he also commented that the unity inspired by shared religion was fading in favor of shared interest in collegiate sports, particularlyAmerican football.
In 1919, he became director of theÉcole Normale Supérieure; for years he was the target ofJean-Paul Sartre’s satirical attacks, and got particularly upset with a 1927 antimilitarist satirical cartoon published by Sartre andGeorges Canguilhem in the University revue. In the same year he was finally led to resign after amedia prank by Sartre and his comrades.[2] In 1927 Lanson's working library of approximately 11,000 volumes was sold toDuke University, in Durham, North Carolina for a sum of 125,000 francs.[3]
Lanson's reputation, particularly in the United States, steadily declined in the years after his death, reaching its nadir in the late 1950s and 1960s. In the era of theNew Criticism, with its interest in the exploration ofmetaphor and image and the distancing of a text from the circumstances that created it, Lanson was seen as a pedant obsessed with historical and biological trivia and a rigid and unliterary philology. In recent years, however, with critics exploring possible commonalities between formal and historical methods and with more intense and lessteleological studies of the history of criticism, interest in Lanson has grown.
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