Incorporations hypodermiques et épistémologiques chez Zola: Science et littérature

This article, starting from an identification of key differences between realism and naturalism, develops an argument premised on the implicit metaphorical relationship between body and text expressed in Le Docteur Pascal, the last novel in Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series. It examines aspects of the metaphorical problems surrounding the incorporation of documentary material into nineteenth-century French fiction, arguing that the documentary novel’s representation of the human body, and of medical practices concerned with the body’s ingestion of substances – specifically, Le Docteur Pascal’s representation of hypodermic injections – functions self-referentially as a way of representing the naturalist text and its incorporation of documentary, extraliterary material.