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Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts setzte die Entliteralisierung der Wissenschaften ein. "Seit dem ersten Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts formieren sich die Sozialwissenschaften ". In Frankreich bildeten Balzac, Flaubert und Zola von ihren Zielsetzungen her eine Konkurrenz für die Sozialwissenschaften und bedrohten deren Identität. Durch die frühe Institutionalisierung der Soziologie in Frankreich wurde der Konflikt zwischen literarischer und sozialwissenschaftlicher Intelligenz sehr deutlich. In Deutschland wurde die Soziologie politisch verdächtigt, erkenntnistheoretisch für unmöglich erklärt und von Kunst und Kultur verhöhnt. Sie entwickelte sich hier "aus antisoziologischem Geist" zu einem Fach, mit dem sich seine Vertreter nur ungern identifizieren. (EZ)

Social statuses existed before the social sciences. When scholars began to develop this concept in the nineteenth century, they were drawing on the juridical writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, more broadly, the vocabulary used by social groups to define themselves across time and space. From this moment forward, social statuses occupied a central position in the work of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. These scholars were aiming to describe and explain the dynamics of human societies, but they also participated in framing the debates at the heart of the social sciences—as attested by the recurrent disputes between a Marxian notion of class and a Weberian conception of status groups, particularly among readers with tacit political motivations. Max Weber played a fundamental part in the success of the concept, taking the juridical aspect and the idea of society as a body, inherited from the ancien régime, and adding a specifically sociological content relating to the hierarchy of social prestige, which is neither directly inherited (as with castes) nor purely economic (as with classes). In truth, this definition was rarely applied stricto sensu by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, but it did allow for the elaboration of a concept that could delimit groups of individuals sharing legal and symbolic characteristics within a given society, and that could incorporate the categories used by social actors themselves into historical analysis. Thus, during the 1960s, it was around the notion of status that interpretations of the ancien régime as a society of orders or a society of classes took shape, while anthropologists began to consider notions of emic and etic. From the 1980s, however, the concept of social status receded into the background as the idea of a global interpretation of society by the social sciences was called into question.

In the article the history of the memoirs genre formation is considered; and its peculiarities in the XVIIth century French literature are defined against the background of the political and spiritual situation development, as well as historic thought and the aesthetics of the period.

The structuralist & genetic conception of the sociol of literature, originated by George Lukacs, is analyzed. 5 basic principles of genetic structuralist sociol are enumerated. They are viewed as indicating that, (1) in the case of the sociol of literature, the res worker must seek to discover a structure which accounts for practically the whole of the text, & he must add nothing to it. (2) He must not overestimate the importance of the individual in the explanation, whether individual or collective, for which the mental structure which governs the work has a functional & signif character. (3) What are commonly called 'influences' have no explanatory value & at the very most constitute a factor & a problem which the res worker must explain. 'In short, comprehension is a problem of the internal coherence of the text, which presupposes that the text, the whole of the text & nothing but the text is taken literally & that, within it, one seeks an overall signif structure.' Several examples are provided, among them analyses of portions LES PENSEES (Thoughts) of B. Pascal & the tragedies of J. Racine. Starting from a text which for him represents a mass of empirical data similar to those by which any other sociol'st who undertakes a piece of res is faced, the sociol'at of literature must first tackle the problem of ascertaining how far those data constitute a signif object, a structure on which positive res can be carried out with fruitful results. The diff's are pointed out between the structuralist sociol of literature & the traditional explanation offered by psychoanalysis or literary history. Traditional methods are concerned with the content of literary works & the relationship between that content & the collective consciousness, or the ways in which men think & behave in daily life. The sociol'al explanations of the Lukacsian Sch pose the problem of the work as a unitary structure of the laws which govern its universe & of the link between that structured universe & the form in which it is expressed. Lastly, the possibility of extending res is discussed by taking as a starting point Julia Kristeva's study on Bakhtin (Critique No.239). E. Weiman.