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Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust ‘[N]ous ne cessons d’ajouter à la Recherche (comme Proust le faisait sur ses manuscrits)’, writes Roland Barthes in 1979, ‘nous ne cessons de l’écrire.’1 In the very nearly forty years since these remarks were made, critics, scholars, filmmakers, creative writers, and others, have indeed continued the process of addition and continuation that Barthes identifies.2 It may be, in fact, that we live in a golden age of Proust scholarship. A diplomatic edition of Proust’s Cahiers is underway and work is progressing towards an accessible digital edition of the correspondence; the publication of a new scholarly edition of À la recherche du temps perdu has begun.3 Whilst well-worn paths are still trodden, original, adventurous, and rigorous research continues to illuminate the field.4 Christopher Prendergast’s scintillating Mirages and Mad Beliefs, for example, dismantles critical commonplaces, drawing attention to an intermittent voice, ‘a sotto voce emanation from the margins and often audible only in the tones of ironic indirection’.5 In attuning our ear to this sceptical voice, Prendergast challenges the primacy of redemptive aesthetics that has long been taken for granted in Proust criticism. At the same time, we find recurring reference to Proust in Terence Cave’s Thinking with Literature — an indication of what another critic has called Proust’s plasticity: his ability to be many things to many readers.6 In preparing an état présent on Proust, Proustian questions soon arise about how far back one should reach into the past; about the extent to which things one might assume to be constant and unchanging do in fact continue to evolve and take on new shapes or resonances. Faced with the vast scale of critical and creative responses to Proust it seems judicious to focus principally on work produced since 2013. This is a relatively recent cut-off, but it is made for compelling reasons. The year 2013 marked the centenary of the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, and as such there was a considerable spike in scholarly publications that year.7 Among these was the landmark edited volume Marcel Proust in Context, the final section of which, ‘Critical Reception’, consists of six chapters spanning topics from the critical reception of À la recherche during Proust’s lifetime to critical responses, translations, and adaptations up to 2012.8 The current état présent, therefore, picks up from this point and identifies six areas for consideration: correspondence, biography, and genetic criticism; philosophy; the arts; intertextual, contextual, and thematic studies; modernism; and creative responses. Before beginning, it is worth noting a trio of recent essays that merit inclusion on reading lists for those broaching Proust for the first time. Marion Schmid’s wide-ranging chapter ‘Marcel Proust (1871–1922): A Modernist Novel of Time’ attends accessibly to a variety of features of À la recherche and is especially clear about the novel’s double internal focalization.9 Also using the question of time to structure a wonderfully lucid essay, Michael Lucey provides an excellent survey of Proust’s stylistic, formal, and thematic innovations in his chapter ‘Becoming Proust in Time’.10 Lastly, Edward Hughes’s characteristically insightful chapter on ‘The Renewal of Narrative in the Wake of Proust’ casts a comparative gaze across narrative practice in French fiction in the middle to end of the twentieth century, giving a useful account of Proust’s legacy to later writers.11 Correspondence, biography, and genetic criticism In Proust among the Stars, Malcolm Bowie seeks to steer attention towards what he calls the ‘dazzling procession of Proust’s paragraphs’ and away from the fascinating yet ultimately ‘thin thread of Proust’s biography’.12 That thread, however, is a resilient one with considerable allure. William C. Carter’s authoritative biography, first published in 2000, was reprinted with corrections and a new preface for the Swann centenary in 2013.13 Jean-Yves Tadié, author of the standard French life of Proust, has supplemented his contribution with Proust et ses amis, published in 2010, and Le Cercle de Marcel Proust, a two-volume edited collection of essays on Proust’s acquaintances: together these three volumes substantively enhance our appreciation of the relationships (both enduring and fleeting) Proust maintained as his novel took shape.14 Despite the crowded field, a major new biography was published in French in 2015, Jérôme Picon’s Marcel Proust: une vie à s’écrire.15 This is an extensive account, drawing above all on Proust’s correspondence, including discoveries of the last two decades and, in particular, the revised dating of certain letters included in the 2004 selection edited by Françoise Leriche.16 Picon’s book is a work of considerable scholarship, but lacks the narrative finesse of the accounts of Carter or Tadié. Two shorter lives also appeared just before Picon’s: my own Marcel Proust in Reaktion Books’ ‘Critical Lives’ series, which seeks to explore how Proust came to write À la recherche and to plot the parallel tracks of his declining health and his ever-expanding novel; and Benjamin Taylor’s Proust: The Search, which appears in Yale’s ‘Jewish Lives’ series.17 More recently still, Évelyne Bloch-Dano, biographer of Proust’s mother, has published a partial biography focusing on Proust’s childhood.18 In parallel, various periods of his life have received renewed attention with the publication of newly discovered correspondence. Michel Schneider’s L’Auteur, l’autre: Proust et son double (2014) is a book-length study eked out of previously unseen but ultimately rather thin manuscript materials: a handful of letters and an essay of just over four pages in length, ‘L’Esthétique de Marcel Proust’, written by Proust in 1921. The essay, Schneider argues, ‘est un document passionnant pour comprendre le regard que Proust porte sur son œuvre à la toute fin de sa vie’.19 Schneider’s book contains insights of a psycho-bio-critical nature, but the ‘auteur’/‘autre’ dichotomy becomes somewhat strained over very nearly three hundred pages. The Lettres au duc de Valentinois, dating from 1920, were published in 2016, shortly after the high-profile publication of the Lettres à sa voisine, a collection of twenty-three brief missives sent by Proust to his neighbour, the wife of an American dentist in boulevard Haussmann, between 1908–09 and 1919.20 In addition to these discoveries, the scholarly accessibility of Proust’s correspondence will soon be greatly boosted by a collaborative project that is making digitally available some two hundred of Proust’s letters relating to the First World War, with an anticipated launch date of 11 November 2018.21 At times in Proust’s letters the initial shapes of ideas or scenarios are tested out, weighed up. Proust’s multifaceted, iterative processes of drafting, expanding, and refining his material continue to receive a great deal of attention, above all from the scholars associated with the ‘Équipe Proust’ based at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM) in Paris, directed by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer. A flavour of the breadth and insights of recent genetic criticism is richly in evidence in the special number of the journal Genesis edited by Mauriac Dyer for the Swann centenary: Proust, 1913, the entirety of which is free to access online.22 Much of the material discussed here pertains to the major project of the ‘Équipe Proust’, the ongoing preparation and publication of a complete edition of the Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France.23 The annually published journal of the ‘Équipe’, the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, edited by Mauriac Dyer, provides insights and sidelights on the work of the scholars associated with the team and the monthly seminars it runs (for the transcription of Proust’s cahiers as well as related academic papers and symposia).24 Although the high cost of the ongoing edition of Proust’s Cahiers makes its volumes inimical to most individual budgets, the full and cost-free digital accessibility, via the Gallica platform, of the Bibliothèque nationale’s ‘fonds Proust’, the manuscript cahiers, notebooks, loose pages, proof-copy, paste-ons, and so forth that are the central focus of the genetic endeavour, means that anyone with an internet connection can now access high-definition reproductions of the ink-and-paper origins of Proust’s novel.25 Philosophy The intersections of Proust’s writings with philosophy have long preoccupied readers and critics. The publication in 2013 of Luc Fraisse’s L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust, however, was a genuinely field-changing event.26 A number of influential studies appeared in the preceding years: in particular Joshua Landy’s Philosophy as Fiction, which sheds light on truth, perspective and (self-) deception, and Anne Simon’s Proust ou le réel retrouvé, which lucidly accounts for Proust’s handling of sensory experience.27 Shorter, though important, contributions have been made by Martin Hägglund’s pages on Proust in Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, which reassess major questions of temporality and desire; by Erika Fülöp in her study of ‘identity and difference’ in À la recherche; and by Jessica Wiskus in the attention she pays to Proust’s phenomenology, through a comparative lens, in The Rhythm of Thought.28 Fraisse’s L’Éclectisme stands out, though, by dint of the sheer breadth and depth of the scholarship upon which it is built. Well over 1,200 pages in length, Fraisse’s study draws abundantly on those texts Proust is known to have read or been exposed to at the Lycée Condorcet, at the Sorbonne, and later in life, as well as those he is likely to have encountered or become acquainted with. Fraisse not only constructs an incremental picture of Proust’s philosophical apprenticeship and development (alongside familiar tutelary figures such as Alphonse Darlu, Paul Janet, Gabriel Séailles, and many, perhaps less familiar, others from his readings) and provides suggestive accounts of the philosophical sources or underpinnings of various scenes from À la recherche; he also provides a rich and discerning account of the philosophical and philosophically inflected reception of Proust’s work (by Proust’s contemporaries as well as critics and thinkers including Anne Henry, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, and Anne Simon). L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust is an exceptional work of erudition that will remain a touchstone in the field for generations of scholars. Fraisse’s work combines intellectual history, reception studies, and textual criticism; a good many insights have been yielded by shorter publications contributing to one or other of these fields in the years since 2013. Jennifer Rushworth and Anna Elsner have fruitfully brought Jacques Derrida’s thought to bear on readings of Proust’s novel.29 Anne Simon’s Trafics de Proust, though less ambitious in scope than Fraisse, is every bit as accomplished in its handling and analysis of material. With perhaps a nod to Michel de Certeau, Simon modestly describes her sparkling central chapters as ‘quatre butinages différents’.30 From this foraging among the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze, and Barthes emerges a Proust who is ‘un référent majeur de leur façon de s’envisager et d’envisager l’exercice de la pensée’.31 Over and again Simon demonstrates persuasively and with great critical sensitivity how Proust’s work becomes ‘une référence en puissance, à tous les niveaux — narratif, thématique, lexical ou rythmique’.32 The arts Like philosophy — and like Proust’s novel — the arts are a house with many rooms, and this is reflected in the volume and diversity of material published in relation to Proust and the arts. The popular appeal of this domain is evinced by the recent re-issue, in paperback, of Eric Karpeles’s Paintings in Proust, whilst a more scholarly and, indeed, authoritative account of painting in Proust is found in Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa’s Proust et l’art pictural.33 Richly illustrative of the range of original responses Proust’s relations with the arts still provoke is the recent edited volume Proust and the Arts.34 Artists and topics are attended to here that one might expect in such a volume — Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Gustave Moreau, John Ruskin, Vittore Carpaccio, Richard Wagner, photography — but also others that refresh and rejuvenate a field one might have thought quite saturated.35 There are essays relating to archaeological discovery; fashion; Proust’s own drawings; Émile Gallé’s work in glass; book art and illustration; acts of listening; and, remarkably and entertainingly, Proust and the Marx brothers. Additionally, readers will garner much from the similarly stimulating Proust et les arts décoratifs,36 and from the wide-ranging Proust and the Visual.37 Sophie Basch’s sumptuously illustrated Rastaquarium: Marcel Proust et le ‘modern style’ is a hugely impressive work of cultural-historical scholarship that adds yet greater nuance to our understanding of the layers of reference Proust built into his work and their polyvalence within it.38 Dance is a minor art in À la recherche and has received little attention until recently. Áine Larkin’s chapter on ‘Theatre and Dance’ in Marcel Proust in Context surveys the cultural-historical context and attends to the most important relevant scenes in the novel, whilst a recent article by Schmid explores resonances between the radical changes in dance in the early twentieth century and Proust’s writing of À la recherche.39 Francine Goujon has considered similar material, tracing Proust’s encounters with the ballets russes and the evolution of descriptions of a dancer (most likely based on Vaslav Nijinsky) in his drafts and in the novel itself.40 Germane, too, is Schmid’s excellent trans-generic exploration of Roland Petit’s Proust-inspired ballet, Proust, ou, les intermittences du cœur.41 Schmid and Martine Beugnet broke new ground with their co-authored Proust at the Movies (2005).42 Now Thomas Carrier-Lafleur’s monograph, L’Œil cinématographique de Proust, at almost seven hundred pages of text, has made a substantive, incremental contribution to the field. Carrier-Lafleur combines detailed consideration of Proust’s awareness of and attitudes towards cinema, and of the ‘cinematic’ qualities of his novel, with analysis of cinematic adaptations of À la recherche. He also attends to wider questions of perception, reproduction, and photography.43 Very recently there has been a spike in critical interest in Proust’s relation to the seventh art as a result of the discovery by Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan of film footage of Proust himself descending the steps of the Madeleine church in Paris after the wedding of Armand de Guiche and Elaine Greffulhe in 1904. The Revue d’études proustiennes ran a number entitled ‘Proust au temps du cinématographe: un écrivain face aux médias’, including an article by Sirois-Trahan articulating and contextualizing his findings. The story went viral and for a week or two people the world over watched Proust (possibly) in motion for the first time.44 Considerable advances have also been made in our understanding of the role of photography in Proust’s aesthetics. Larkin’s contribution, Proust Writing Photography, is a standard reference now and has been followed by a range of other works staking out related ground, notably Akane Kawakami’s Photobiography and Mary Bergstein’s In Looking Back One Learns to See.45 Additionally, through a series of articles and a monograph, Kathrin Yacavone has used the study of photography to show the connections, tensions, and complementarities of Proust, Barthes, and Walter Benjamin, a nexus also explored in Katja Haustein’s Regarding Lost Time.46 Recent years have seen a welcome diversification of approaches to thinking about the role of music in Proust’s aesthetics.47 A special issue of Romance Studies, edited by Larkin, Unsettling Scores: Proust and Music, pushes beyond pondering possible models for Vinteuil’s fictional compositions.48 Instead, following Peter Dayan’s lead,49 the articles in Unsettling Scores pose questions about literary structure, texture, tradition, and experiment, and the particularities of all of these, as found in Proust’s musically informed writing. Dayan’s work is also centrally important to Joseph Acquisto’s recent study Proust, Music, and Meaning, which argues that by better appreciating how music was listened to in Beethoven’s time and in Proust’s time, one might develop a more nuanced capacity to appreciate Proust’s writing.50 Moving away from Schopenhauerian readings of music in Proust as an access route to transcendental truth (the sort put forward by Nattiez and by Anne Henry),51 Acquisto argues for the endlessly iterative nature of the listening experience as illustrative of the impossibility of comprehensive understanding, the associated frustration of which we find repeatedly in Proust’s novel (and not just in scenes of listening). The marked differences in focus and methodology between Acquisto’s study and Cécile Leblanc’s Proust écrivain de la musique underscore once more the diversity of possible responses to the same broad aspect of Proust’s work.52 Where Acquisto tends toward the theoretical and abstract, Leblanc is steadfastly empirical and rooted in a startling volume of primary and secondary reading in Proust’s manuscripts, his correspondence, and in the music writing of Proust’s time. Leblanc’s is an authoritative account of the genesis and development of the scenes relating to music in À la recherche and a significant contribution to fin-de-siècle cultural history delineating Proust’s relations to the cultural opinion formers and critics of his time. Proust écrivain de la musique is an important reminder that we still have much to learn from the study of contemporary journalism and cultural commentary. Using Proust’s correspondence as an initial guide to what he was reading or exposed to, and benefiting from the accessibility of the Gallica platform, researchers may yet have significant discoveries to make in relation to sources (critical, fictional, journalistic, medical, and so on) that may have contributed to this or that image, scene, or piece of dialogue.53 Intertextual, contextual, and thematic studies For scholars with a hunch about borrowings or allusions in or to Proust’s novel, La Petite Musique du style: Proust et ses sources littéraires is an invaluable starting point.54 The volume collects pieces by Fraisse written or published, in the main, between the early 1990s and 2010, and moves chronologically through essays on a wide range of writers from Homer, François de La Rochefoucauld, and the comte de Buffon, to contemporaries such as Romain Rolland and Anna de Noailles and later writers including Henri Michaux, Julien Gracq, and François Cheng.55 Shuangyi Li’s recent book, Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement, represents an important, transnational departure in Proust studies: Li gives substantive space to a discussion of the intertextual relations between Proust and Cheng, but also provides fascinating analysis of the reception and translation history of Proust’s novel in China, showing how translators and scholars broached the politically sensitive dimensions of the novel (such as its treatment of homosexuality and anti-Semitism).56 If the study of intertextuality seeks in part to discern what Ali Smith has called ‘the handshake between sources’,57 then a recent trend identifiable in Proust studies is the attention being paid to the handshakes, nods, and whispers between Proust’s writings and those of Barthes. Proust is a near-constant yet shifting presence throughout Barthes’s œuvre and Thomas Baldwin, in particular, through a series of articles and chapters, some already indicated, has illuminated this presence.58 The publication of Barthes’s Journal de deuil in 2009 prompted a number of intertextual analyses that highlight the role of Proust in Barthes’s coming to terms with his mother’s death.59 George Steiner, writing in the 1970s, argued that ‘Dante and Proust, like no others, give us the gossip of eternity’.60 Recent scholarship has pressed this claim and demonstrated a range of intriguing ways in which the thirteenth-century poet’s writing and thought intersect with Proust’s work.61 Rushworth’s Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch and Proust is a bold and impressive work of comparative scholarship that reminds us that conventional chronological and generic boundaries are permeable. Parallels and mutually illuminating facets of theme and stylistic practice have equally been astutely exposed by Julia Hartley.62 The wider intersections of Proust and the Middle Ages, first pointed up in Richard Bales’s groundbreaking research over forty years ago, have been explored in a veritable treasure trove of an edited volume, Proust et les ‘Moyen Âge’.63 Another period that has seen renewed attention is the First World War. Scholars now have an excellent range of sources to consult when seeking to place Proust and his novel within the context of the years 1914 to 1918, from analyses of adjustments made to the text of the novel to accommodate the upheaval of the conflict, to diachronic studies of Proust’s actions, personal and creative, during the war.64 Modernism Modernism is one of the artistic currents that cut across the period of the First World War and the borders of the nations touched by the conflict. An interesting cultural/disciplinary issue is encountered when one turns to Proust’s place in this domain, since despite its transnational, cosmopolitan credentials, modernism is a critical term with minimal purchase in the study of literature in French within the French academy. Modernist studies, however, is a booming English-language field publishing a great deal of critical material, primarily by scholars working in English or comparative literature departments.65 A handful of studies have had ‘crossover’ success and are frequently cited in scholarship on Proust, such as Sara Danius’s The Senses of Modernism, which contains a long, insightful chapter on movement and the senses in Proust.66 A recent work of notable finesse and critical verve is Hannah Freed-Thall’s Spoiled Distinctions, which reads Proust alongside Nathalie Sarraute, Francis Ponge, and Yasmina Reza.67 Much modernist scholarship, however, does not make it on to the desks or screens of those working solely on Proust, which is a pity, since there is a good deal of critical-theoretical innovation in the field. Equally, it seems that relatively little Proust criticism — textual, genetic, contextual — is read by those who identify as modernist scholars without being Proust specialists. For example, in his recent study, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man, Andrew Goldstone includes a stimulating section on the role of domestic servants, particularly Françoise, in the development of the narrator’s aesthetics in Proust’s novel. A compelling case is made, but it would have been bolstered and nuanced by reference to important, germane work by Jacques Dubois, or by Hughes in Proust, Class, and Nation.68 We find something similar in Lisi Schoenbach’s Pragmatic Modernism, which is principally a study of Gertrude Stein and Henry James, read with and through pragmatist philosophy, especially the writings of William James. A short epilogue triangulates Proust’s writing on habit with the two Jameses, offering interesting though not original connections, yet Schoenbach pays no heed to existing work on Proust and philosophy (indeed, the only critical source devoted to Proust that is cited is Beckett’s 1931 essay).69 In recent major period-specific histories the crossover has been rather better. An insightful chapter on Sodome et Gomorrhe’s curious publishing history and its connections to contemporary preoccupations with Judaism and alterity, figures in the edited volume 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics.70 Meanwhile, in his contribution to Gregory Castle’s History of the Modernist Novel, Jean-Michel Rabaté frames his chapter on ‘Modernism and the French Novel’ with references to Proust, opening with his polemic with Mallarmé in 1896 and closing with the reflection that À la recherche is a work that ultimately ‘goes beyond mere modernism’, although one wonders just how helpful this conclusion is.71 While Proust bookends that essay, he is more squarely the subject of another piece by Rabaté in The Cambridge History of Modernism, which provides a more detailed account of Proust’s position in the modernist landscape in France over the full span of his creative life.72 Lastly, it is via a consideration of Judaism and twentieth-century social life that Walter Cohen attends to Proust as a modernist, alongside Joyce and Kafka, in his recent History of European Literature.73 While Cohen’s pages relating specifically to Proust do not articulate anything previously unremarked about À la recherche, their place in the book’s larger argument, touching as it does on questions of convention and innovation, periphery and centre, otherness and community, provide a welcome encouragement to see this canonically French author as a key figure in a broader, variegated, European cultural enterprise. Creative responses Alongside the monographs and articles that appear in response to À la recherche, a modest but nevertheless valuable number of creative responses have entered the public domain in recent years, ‘nourishing’, as Baldwin puts it, ‘the desire to engage heterogeneously and intensively with À la recherche from within’.74 Besides Anne Garréta’s novel and others, which absorb, adapt, and respond to Proust in fictional forms, innovative poetic responses have also appeared that invite questions for future research about alternative shapes and forms for criticism.75 Anne Carson’s pamphlet The Albertine Workout is at once a highly intelligent critical response to gender, agency, and personal relations in Proust’s novel and an arch, playful critique of scholarly attitudes towards it.76 Clive James’s more extensive Gate of Lilacs is an intriguing echo chamber of allusion, critical reflection, and moving personal response.77 ‘I had always thought the critical essay and the poem were closely related forms’, writes James, and, indeed, in Christopher Norris’s yet more radical The Winnowing Fan, Proust flits in and out as Norris ponders writers from Mallarmé to Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Derrida.78 These responses may not be the future of mainstream criticism but they undoubtedly revitalize how we read and interact with À la recherche; they also underscore the fact of Proust’s plasticity and ineradicable plurality: his being, as Anne Simon has it, ‘un hybride à plusieurs têtes, une chimère dotée de “grappes de visages” parfois étrangers, monstrueux ou défigurés’.79 Footnotes 1 Roland Barthes, ‘Noureev et la Berma’ (1979), in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Éric Marty, new edn, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 2002), v, 628. 2 For a recent illustrative collection of reflections and responses by non-specialist scholars and creative individuals (including Chantal Akerman, Pierre Boulez, Annie Ernaux, Carlo Ginzburg, and Pierre Nora, among others), see Lire et relire Proust, ed. by Antoine Compagnon and others (Nantes: Éditions Nouvelles Cécile Defaut, 2014). This volume stems from Compagnon’s 2013 seminar at the Collège de France; a similar volume, this time stemming from a radio series broadcast on France Inter in 2013, is Un été avec Proust, ed. by Laura El Makki (Paris: Éditions des Équateurs, 2014); it includes chapters by eight scholars and novelists including Compagnon, Jean-Yves Tadié, and Julia Kristeva. 3 On the editions of the Cahiers and of Proust’s correspondence, see below. To date, two volumes of the new edition of À la recherche have appeared: La Prisonnière, ed. by Luc Fraisse (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013); and La Fugitive, ed. by Luc Fraisse (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017). Together these two volumes contain almost 500 pages of introductory material and 700 pages of comprehensive endnotes (variants are indicated as footnotes): the presentation and editorial work is at least the equal of the existing Pléiade edition with the advantage of ‘catching up’ on the scholarship produced since the publication of the latter between 1987 and 1989. See Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié and others, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89). 4 To take just two examples of recent publications that illustrate the vast spread of approaches to the novel, see the accomplished cultural-historical study by Pauline Moret-Jankus, Race et imaginaire biologique chez Proust (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016); and the pages on Proust in Marta Figlerowicz’s Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), which pose radical challenges to conventional readings of Proust; see especially ‘The Solipsist’, pp. 128–69. 5 Christopher Prendergast, Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 14. 6 Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). On Proust’s plasticity, see Anne Simon, ‘Plasticité de Proust’, in Trafics de Proust: Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze, Barthes (Paris: Hermann, 2016), pp. 7–38. Proust’s multifarious appeal is eloquently evidenced in the selected writings of Malcolm Bowie, posthumously published in 2013: Selected Essays of Malcolm Bowie, ed. by Alison Finch, 2 vols (Oxford: Legenda, 2013). Dreams of Knowledge, the first volume, contains five substantive pieces on Proust: ‘Proust and Psychoanalysis’ (1998), pp. 21–31; ‘Plutarch to Proust: Exemplary Lives’ (1998), pp. 32–45; ‘Proust and the Art of Brevity’ (2001), pp. 46–57; ‘Proust and Italian Painting’ (2004), pp. 58–80; and ‘Reading Proust between the Lines’ (2009), pp. 81–90. Another eight shorter pieces, amounting to thirty richly rewarding pages in total, are included in the second volume, Song Man, pp. 203–31. 7 See, for example, Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, 43 (2013), which focuses exclusively on the Swann centenary; Swann, le centenaire, ed. by Antoine Compagnon, Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa, and Matthieu Vernet (Paris: Hermann, 2013), stemming from the 2012 conference of the same title at Cerisy-la-Salle; D’après Proust, ed. by Philippe Forest and Stéphane Audeguy (= Nouvelle Revue française, 603–04 (2013)); Marcel Proust (= Europe, 1012–13 (2013)); and Proust Reread, ed. by Elisabeth Ladenson (= Romanic Review, 105.3–4 (2014)). A number of significant ‘hors série’ publications also appeared, usefully bringing together new and long-established critical accounts of aspects of Proust’s work: see Marcel Proust (Paris: Le Magazine littéraire, ‘Nouveaux Regards’, 2013); Marcel Proust: à l’ombre de l’imaginaire (Paris: Le Monde, ‘Hors série’, 2013); and Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu. Philosophie Magazine Hors Série, 16 (January–February 2013). Le Magazine littéraire also published a valuable forty-page dossier ‘Proust, cent ans de Recherche’, co-ordinated by Alexandre Gefen and Matthieu Vernet (Le Magazine littéraire, 535 (2013), 46–87). 8 Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Adam Watt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 181–240. On recent critical reception, see in particular Thomas Baldwin, ‘Mid-Twentieth-Century Views, 1960s to 1980s’, pp. 199–205; and Adam Watt, ‘Late-Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Responses’, pp. 206–13. 9 Marion Schmid, ‘Marcel Proust (1871–1922): A Modernist Novel of Time’, in The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists, ed. by Michael Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 327–42. 10 Michael Lucey, ‘Becoming Proust in Time’, in A History of Modern French Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, ed. by Christopher Prendergast (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 514–33. 11 Edward J. Hughes, ‘The Renewal of Narrative in the Wake of Proust’, in The Cambridge Companion to French Literature, ed. by John D. Lyons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 187–203. 12 Malcolm Bowie, Proust among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. xiv. 13 William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013 [2000]). In the preface Carter explains that, whilst some corrections have been made, no new material has been added; Carter’s discoveries since 2000 may be consulted in two related books: Proust in Love (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) and The Memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgren, Proust’s Swedish Valet, ed. by Carter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 14 Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: biographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Proust et ses amis, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2010); Le Cercle de Proust, 2 vols, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015–16). Increasingly scholars are turning to Proust’s acquaintances as subjects of study in their own right: see for example Rubén Gallo, Proust’s Latin Americans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) and Gian Balsamo, Proust and his Banker: In Search of Time Squandered (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017). 15 Jérôme Picon, Marcel Proust: une vie à s’écrire (Paris: Flammarion, 2015). 16 Marcel Proust: lettres, ed. by Françoise Leriche (Paris: Plon, 2004). Because of the inclusion of inédits and the corrections of dating made by Leriche, this volume supplements and complements Philip Kolb’s standard edition, Correspondance de Marcel Proust, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1970–93). 17 Adam Watt, Marcel Proust (London: Reaktion Books, 2013); Benjamin Taylor, Proust: The Search (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 18 Évelyne Bloch-Dano, Une jeunesse de Marcel Proust: enquête sur le questionnaire (Paris: Stock, 2017); Bloch-Dano’s life of Proust’s mother is Madame Proust (Paris: Grasset, 2004). 19 Michel Schneider, L’Auteur, l’autre: Proust et son double (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), p. 202. 20 Lettres au duc de Valentinois, ed. by Jean-Marc Quaranta (Paris: Gallimard, 2016); the letters were first published in Annales monégasques: revue d’histoire de Monaco, 39 (2015), 193–244. Lettres à sa voisine, ed. by Estelle Gaudry and Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). The collections are slim (each under ninety pages of text); Lettres à sa voisine has received considerable attention in the anglophone world, however, due to a much-publicized English translation: see Marcel Proust, Letters to the Lady Upstairs, trans. by Lydia Davis (London: HarperCollins, 2017). 21 ‘Marcel Proust’s World War I Letters: A Digital Edition’, is a collaboration between the Proust–Kolb Archive at the University of Illinois, the Université Grenoble-Alpes and the ITEM, Paris, and represents a first stage in providing a digital, open-access edition of Proust’s letters, including diplomatic transcriptions and high-resolution images of original documents. The ‘World War I Letters’ project grows out of a 2014 exhibition at Illinois; see François Proulx, ‘Proust and the Great War (Part 1)’, <https://nonsolusblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/proust-and-the-great-war> [accessed 6 March 2018]. For a detailed discussion of the background to the electronic edition of Proust’s letters mentioned above, see the article by Françoise Leriche, ‘Rééditer Proust au vingt et unième siècle: intertexte, intratexte, avant-texte’, Proust, 1913, ed. by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer (= Genesis, 36 (2013)), pp. 25–35. 22 Proust, 1913, ed. by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer (= Genesis, 36 (2013)), <http://journals.openedition.org/genesis/866> [accessed 6 March 2018]. 23 Marcel Proust, Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, ed. by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008– ). To date six volumes have appeared: Cahier 54 (2008); Cahier 71 (2010); Cahier 26 (2011); Cahier 53 (2013); Cahier 44 (2015); Cahier 67 (2017). 24 Whilst genetic approaches dominate, they are not the exclusive domain of the articles published in the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes. The journal was established in 1975; many letters, ‘dédicaces’, photographs, and documents pertaining to Proust and his writings that have been discovered since this time have appeared and been commented upon in its pages. 25 To access to the complete Gallica holdings (with the possibility of downloading individual files), see ‘Fonds Proust numérique’, <http://www.item.ens.fr/fonds-proust-numerique> [accessed 6 March 2018]. For a highly informative account of the digitization of the Proust holdings, see Guillaume Fau, ‘Le Fonds Proust au département des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale de France: notes pour un cinquantenaire’, Proust, 1913, ed. by Mauriac Dyer, pp. 135–40. 26 Luc Fraisse, L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2013). 27 Joshua Landy, Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Anne Simon, Proust ou le réel retrouvé: le sensible et son expression dans ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000; re-issued Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011). 28 Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Erika Fülöp, Proust, the One, and the Many: Identity and Difference in ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Legenda, 2012); Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-Ponty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), especially ‘Proust through the Fold of Memory’ and ‘Proust: In Search of the True Albertine’, pp. 26–38 and 66–76. 29 Jennifer Rushworth, ‘Derrida, Proust and the Promise of Writing’, French Studies, 69 (2015), 205–19; Anna Magdalena Elsner, ‘“Penser commence peut-être là”: Proust and Derrida on Animals, Ethics, and Mortality’, Modern Language Review, 111 (2016), 373–89. Derrida, alongside Freud, Barthes, and Kristeva, provides an important plank of the critical framework of Rushworth’s brilliant, connection-making comparative study, Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): see in particular ‘Proust’s Recherche, Derridean ‘demi-deuil’ and Mimetic Mourning’, pp. 91–125. Elsner draws suggestively on Freud and Derrida (among others) in constructing a fascinating account of the ethics of creativity and its links to mourning in Mourning and Creativity in Proust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 30 Simon, Trafics de Proust, p. 13. See also Michel de Certeau, ‘Lire: un braconnage’, in L’Invention du quotidien, i: Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1980; reprinted 1990), pp. 239–55. 31 Simon, Trafics de Proust, p. 35. 32 Simon, Trafics de Proust, p. 40. Thomas Baldwin offers a complementary account of Proust’s reception in the writings of Deleuze and Barthes in his chapter ‘Mid-Twentieth-Century Views, 1960s to 1980s’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Watt, pp. 199–205, and in his article ‘Félix Guattari’s Swann’, in Swann at 100 / Swann à 100 ans, ed. by Adam Watt (=Marcel Proust aujourd’hui, 12 (2015)), pp. 35–49; on neighbouring ground, see also Anne Simon, ‘Les Lignes de fuite de Swann’, in Swann at 100 / Swann à 100 ans, ed. by Watt, pp. 109–18. 33 Eric Karpeles, Paintings in Proust (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008; reprinted 2017); Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa, Proust et l’art pictural (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010). For more recent engagements with Proust and painting, see Nicolas Valazza’s chapter, ‘Proust et l’incorporation du pinceau’, in his Crise de plume et souveraineté du pinceau: écrire la peinture de Diderot à Proust (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), pp. 267–320; Luc Fraisse, ‘Du côté de chez Swann daté par sa prose d’art? Le morceau sur les clochers de Martinville’, in Écrire en artistes des Goncourt à Proust, ed. by Pierre-Jean Dufief and Gabrielle Melison-Hirchwald (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2016), pp. 193–204; and Adam Watt, ‘Portraits by the Artists as Young Men: Proust, Valéry, Colour’, in Thinking Colour-Writing, ed. by Susan Harrow (= French Studies, 71.3 (2017)), pp. 333–47. Another significant contribution is made by Davide Vago, Proust en couleur (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015). 34 Proust and the Arts, ed. by Christie McDonald and François Proulx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 35 On Proust’s relations to Ruskin, see Dictionnaire Proust–Ruskin, ed. by Jérôme Bastianelli (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017). 36 Proust et les arts décoratifs: poétique, matérialité, histoire, ed. by Boris Roman Gibhardt and Julie Ramos (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013). The chapters, too numerous to list here, broach topics from wallpaper in Le Côté de Guermantes to japonisme and the cult of Proustian objects; a valuable ‘cahier iconographique’ is included (pp. 205–32). 37 Proust and the Visual, ed. by Nathalie Aubert (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). 38 Sophie Basch, Rastaquarium: Marcel Proust et le ‘modern style’. Arts décoratifs et politique dans ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). Basch’s book is a major achievement but not without precedent: for a shorter but exacting study, see Cynthia Gamble, ‘22 rue de Provence: Siegfried Bing’s Hub of Art Nouveau Creativity and its rayonnement in the World of Proust’, in Au seuil de la modernité: Proust, Literature and the Arts. Essays in Memory of Richard Bales, ed. by Nigel Harkness and Marion Schmid (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 113–28. 39 Áine Larkin, ‘Theatre and Dance’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Watt, pp. 97–104; Marion Schmid, ‘Proust’s Choreographies of Writing: À la recherche du temps perdu and the Modern Dance Revolution’, in Swann at 100 / Swann à 100 ans, ed. by Watt, pp. 91–108. 40 Francine Goujon, ‘Les Larmes de Nijinski: un récit crypté dans À la recherche du temps perdu’, Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, 47 (2017), 89–102. 41 Marion Schmid, ‘Proust at the Ballet: Literature and Dance in Dialogue’, French Studies, 72 (2013), 184–98. 42 Martine Beugnet and Marion Schmid, Proust at the Movies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 43 Thomas Carrier-Lafleur, L’Œil cinématographique de Proust (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015). 44 See Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, ‘Un spectre passa… Marcel Proust retrouvé’, Revue d’études proustiennes, 2 (2016), 19–30. For a permanent link to the footage and a collection of links to major press coverage in English and French, as well as some reflection by biographer William Carter on the discovery, see Proust-Ink.com, ‘Was Proust Captured on Film Leaving a Wedding in 1904?’, <http://www.proust-ink.com/news/2017/2/24/was-proust-captured-on-film-leaving-a-wedding-in-1904> [accessed 8 March 2018]. This website, celebrating the life and works of Proust, is maintained by Carter and Nicolas Drogoul. See also the website Pôle Proust, established by Anne Simon, <http://poleproust.hypotheses.org> [accessed 8 March 2018], for information on publications, events, and activities relating to Proust. 45 Áine Larkin, Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Legenda, 2011); Akane Kawakami, Photobiography: Photographic Self Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé (Oxford: Legenda, 2013); Mary Bergstein, In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014). See also Emily Setina, ‘Proust’s Darkroom’, Modern Language Notes, 131 (2016), 1080–1112. 46 See Kathrin Yacavone, ‘Barthes et Proust: La Recherche comme aventure photographique’, L’Écrivain préféré, Fabula LHT, 4 (2008), <http://www.fabula.org/lht/4/Yacavone.html> [accessed 8 March 2018]; ‘Reading through Photography: Roland Barthes’ Last Seminar “Proust et la photographie”’, French Forum, 34 (2009), 97–112; Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); and ‘Photographie, écriture et mémoire: images d’enfance chez Benjamin et Proust’, Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, 44 (2014), 63–77; and Katja Haustein, Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, 2012). 47 For many years the primary touchstone has been Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Proust musicien (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984). For a survey of writing on Proust and music from the 1980s to 2012, see Julian Johnson, ‘Music’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Watt, pp. 90–96. 48 Unsettling Scores: Proust and Music, ed. by Áine Larkin (= Romance Studies, 32.3 (2014)). 49 Peter Dayan, Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). See, in particular, ‘How Music Enables Proust to Write Paradise Lost’, pp. 79–96. 50 Joseph Acquisto, Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the ‘Recherche’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 51 Nattiez, Proust musicien; Anne Henry, Proust: théories pour une esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1983). 52 Cécile Leblanc, Proust écrivain de la musique: l’allégresse du compositeur (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017). 53 Another recent study that takes such an approach most successfully is Michael Finn’s scrupulously researched Figures of the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 54 Luc Fraisse, La Petite Musique du style: Proust et ses sources littéraires (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011). 55 Fraisse does not attend to the familiar pairing of Proust and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, although this has been the subject of an illuminating book-length study: see Donatien Grau, Tout contre Sainte-Beuve: l’inspiration retrouvée (Paris: Grasset, 2013). 56 Shuangyi Li, Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement: Translation and Transcultural Dialogue (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). See also Li’s articles ‘Proust and China: Translation, Ideology and Contemporary Intertextual Practice’, Comparative Critical Studies, 11 (2014), 295–314, and ‘Transcultural Novels and Translating Cultures: François Cheng’s Le Dit de Tianyi and L’Éternité n’est pas de trop’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 53 (2017), 179–99. 57 Ali Smith, Artful (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), p. 201. 58 In addition to those mentioned above, see especially Thomas Baldwin, ‘On Barthes on Proust’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 48 (2012), 274–87; ‘Charlus/z’, Nottingham French Studies, 53 (2014), 90–101; ‘Rewriting Proust’, L’Esprit créateur, 55 (2015), 70–85; and ‘Marcel Proust, On and Off’, in Lucidity: Essays in Honour of Alison Finch, ed. by Ian James and Emma Wilson (Oxford: Legenda, 2016), pp. 121–31. 59 See Adam Watt, ‘Reading Proust in Barthes’ Journal de deuil’, Nottingham French Studies, 53 (2014), 102–12, and Jennifer Rushworth, ‘Mourning and Intermittence between Proust and Barthes’, Paragraph, 39 (2016), 269–87. 60 George Steiner, ‘Dante Now: The Gossip of Eternity’, in On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 164–85 (pp. 171–72). First published in Encounter, 46 (1976), 36–45. 61 See for example Anne Teulade, ‘Proust et l’épopée de Dante’, in Proust, l’étranger, ed. by Karen Haddad-Wotling and Vincent Ferré (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 15–36; Catherine O’Beirne, ‘Proust and the Carlylean Mediation of Dante’, in Au seuil de la modernité, ed. by Harkness and Schmid, pp. 17–37; and Adam Watt, ‘“L’air de la chanson”: Dante and Proust’, in Dante in France, ed. by Russell Goulbourne, Claire Honess, and Matthew Treherne (= La Parola del Testo, 17.1–2 (2013)), pp. 101–10. 62 Julia Hartley, ‘Reading in Dante and Proust’, Modern Language Notes, 130 (2015), 1130–49; ‘L’Analogie chez Dante et Proust’, in Marcel Proust, roman moderne: perspectives comparatistes, ed. by Vincent Ferré, Raffaello Rossi, and Delphine Paon (= Marcel Proust aujourd’hui, 14 (2017)), pp. 76–86. 63 Proust et les ‘Moyen Âge’, ed. by Sophie Duval and Miren Lacassagne (Paris: Hermann, 2015). Richard Bales’s foundational work is Proust and the Middle Ages (Geneva: Droz, 1975). 64 See Pierre-Louis Rey’s essay on the geographical shifting of Combray in the 1919 re-edition of Du côté de chez Swann, ‘Combray en Champagne’, in Swann, le centenaire, ed. by Compagnon, Yoshikawa, and Vernet, pp. 291–305; Brigitte Mahuzier’s excellent monograph Proust et la guerre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014); the dozen essays collected in Proust écrivain de la Première Guerre mondiale, ed. by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer and Philippe Chadin (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2014); and Hervé Picherit’s recent comparative study, Le Livre des écorchés : Proust, Céline et la Grande Guerre (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2016). 65 For a brief summary of the French context see Hugues Azérad, ‘Paris and the Avant-Garde’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Watt, pp. 59–66, and for the broader European background, see David Ellison, ‘Modernism’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Watt, pp. 214–20. See also Ben Hutchinson’s useful pages on Proust in Modernism and Style (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 32–38 and 135–42. 66 Sara Danius, ‘The Education of the Senses: Remembrance of Things Past and the Modernist Rhetoric of Motion’, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 91–146. 67 Hannah Freed-Thall, Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); see in particular ‘Aesthetic Disorientation in Proust’, pp. 23–90. 68 Andrew Goldstone, ‘Proust: Service in the Magic Circle’, in Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 52–65; Jacques Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social (Paris: Seuil, 1997); Edward J. Hughes, Proust, Class, and Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially ‘Masters, Laws, and Servants’ and ‘Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé’ (pp. 200–22 and 223–38). 69 Lisi Schoenbach, ‘Epilogue: Proustian Habit and Pragmatic Modernism’, in Pragmatic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 135–46. Beckett’s essay was first published as Proust (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931). The connection between William James and Proust was made at least as long ago as 1989 in Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a recent account of Proustian habit, see Erika Fülöp, ‘Habit in À la recherche du temps perdu’, French Studies, 68 (2014), 344–58. 70 André Benhaïm, ‘Odd Encounters: From Marcel Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe to Albert Cohen’s “Projections ou Après-Minuit à Genève”’, in 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics, ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 43–55. 71 Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Modernism and the French Novel: A Genealogy (1888–1913)’, in A History of the Modernist Novel, ed. by Gregory Castle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 86–109 (p. 107). Proust’s attack on Mallarmé’s aesthetics, ‘Contre l’obscurité’, can be found in Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et mélanges, et suivi de Essais et articles, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 390–95. 72 Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘French Modernism: Gide, Proust, and Larbaud’, in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. by Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 575–91. 73 Walter Cohen, ‘Jewishness and Modernist Fiction’, in A History of European Literature: The West and the World from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 407–42. 74 Thomas Baldwin, ‘On Garréta on Proust’, French Studies, 70 (2016), 33–43 (p. 43). Baldwin’s article is a study of Anne Garréta’s novel, La Décomposition (Paris: Grasset, 1999). 75 For examples besides Garréta, see Adam Watt, ‘Epilogue: Proustian Afterlives’, in The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 116–22; and, for an illustrated exploration of further diversity in the field, see Adam Watt, ‘Proust between Print Culture and Visual Art: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Works in Fiber, Paper, and Proust”’, Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 8 (2015), 179–91. 76 Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout (New York: New Directions, 2014). For an analysis of how Carson blurs the boundaries between creative writing and criticism, see Adam Watt, ‘Poetry as Creative Critique: Notes from the Desert of After-Proust (on Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout)’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 20 (2016), 648–56. 77 Clive James, Gate of Lilacs: A Verse Commentary on Proust (London: Picador, 2016). 78 James, Gate of Lilacs, p. xii; Christopher Norris, The Winnowing Fan: Verse-Essays in Creative Criticism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 79 Simon, Trafics de Proust, p. 208. The phrase ‘grappes de visages’ is taken from Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Tadié, ii (1988), p. 270. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices) © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png French Studies Oxford University Press

Marcel Proust

Watt, Adam
French Studies , Volume 72 (3) – Jul 1, 2018
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Abstract

‘[N]ous ne cessons d’ajouter à la Recherche (comme Proust le faisait sur ses manuscrits)’, writes Roland Barthes in 1979, ‘nous ne cessons de l’écrire.’1 In the very nearly forty years since these remarks were made, critics, scholars, filmmakers, creative writers, and others, have indeed continued the process of addition and continuation that Barthes identifies.2 It may be, in fact, that we live in a golden age of Proust scholarship. A diplomatic edition of Proust’s Cahiers is underway and work is progressing towards an accessible digital edition of the correspondence; the publication of a new scholarly edition of À la recherche du temps perdu has begun.3 Whilst well-worn paths are still trodden, original, adventurous, and rigorous research continues to illuminate the field.4 Christopher Prendergast’s scintillating Mirages and Mad Beliefs, for example, dismantles critical commonplaces, drawing attention to an intermittent voice, ‘a sotto voce emanation from the margins and often audible only in the tones of ironic indirection’.5 In attuning our ear to this sceptical voice, Prendergast challenges the primacy of redemptive aesthetics that has long been taken for granted in Proust criticism. At the same time, we find recurring reference to Proust in Terence Cave’s Thinking with Literature — an indication of what another critic has called Proust’s plasticity: his ability to be many things to many readers.6 In preparing an état présent on Proust, Proustian questions soon arise about how far back one should reach into the past; about the extent to which things one might assume to be constant and unchanging do in fact continue to evolve and take on new shapes or resonances. Faced with the vast scale of critical and creative responses to Proust it seems judicious to focus principally on work produced since 2013. This is a relatively recent cut-off, but it is made for compelling reasons. The year 2013 marked the centenary of the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, and as such there was a considerable spike in scholarly publications that year.7 Among these was the landmark edited volume Marcel Proust in Context, the final section of which, ‘Critical Reception’, consists of six chapters spanning topics from the critical reception of À la recherche during Proust’s lifetime to critical responses, translations, and adaptations up to 2012.8 The current état présent, therefore, picks up from this point and identifies six areas for consideration: correspondence, biography, and genetic criticism; philosophy; the arts; intertextual, contextual, and thematic studies; modernism; and creative responses. Before beginning, it is worth noting a trio of recent essays that merit inclusion on reading lists for those broaching Proust for the first time. Marion Schmid’s wide-ranging chapter ‘Marcel Proust (1871–1922): A Modernist Novel of Time’ attends accessibly to a variety of features of À la recherche and is especially clear about the novel’s double internal focalization.9 Also using the question of time to structure a wonderfully lucid essay, Michael Lucey provides an excellent survey of Proust’s stylistic, formal, and thematic innovations in his chapter ‘Becoming Proust in Time’.10 Lastly, Edward Hughes’s characteristically insightful chapter on ‘The Renewal of Narrative in the Wake of Proust’ casts a comparative gaze across narrative practice in French fiction in the middle to end of the twentieth century, giving a useful account of Proust’s legacy to later writers.11 Correspondence, biography, and genetic criticism In Proust among the Stars, Malcolm Bowie seeks to steer attention towards what he calls the ‘dazzling procession of Proust’s paragraphs’ and away from the fascinating yet ultimately ‘thin thread of Proust’s biography’.12 That thread, however, is a resilient one with considerable allure. William C. Carter’s authoritative biography, first published in 2000, was reprinted with corrections and a new preface for the Swann centenary in 2013.13 Jean-Yves Tadié, author of the standard French life of Proust, has supplemented his contribution with Proust et ses amis, published in 2010, and Le Cercle de Marcel Proust, a two-volume edited collection of essays on Proust’s acquaintances: together these three volumes substantively enhance our appreciation of the relationships (both enduring and fleeting) Proust maintained as his novel took shape.14 Despite the crowded field, a major new biography was published in French in 2015, Jérôme Picon’s Marcel Proust: une vie à s’écrire.15 This is an extensive account, drawing above all on Proust’s correspondence, including discoveries of the last two decades and, in particular, the revised dating of certain letters included in the 2004 selection edited by Françoise Leriche.16 Picon’s book is a work of considerable scholarship, but lacks the narrative finesse of the accounts of Carter or Tadié. Two shorter lives also appeared just before Picon’s: my own Marcel Proust in Reaktion Books’ ‘Critical Lives’ series, which seeks to explore how Proust came to write À la recherche and to plot the parallel tracks of his declining health and his ever-expanding novel; and Benjamin Taylor’s Proust: The Search, which appears in Yale’s ‘Jewish Lives’ series.17 More recently still, Évelyne Bloch-Dano, biographer of Proust’s mother, has published a partial biography focusing on Proust’s childhood.18 In parallel, various periods of his life have received renewed attention with the publication of newly discovered correspondence. Michel Schneider’s L’Auteur, l’autre: Proust et son double (2014) is a book-length study eked out of previously unseen but ultimately rather thin manuscript materials: a handful of letters and an essay of just over four pages in length, ‘L’Esthétique de Marcel Proust’, written by Proust in 1921. The essay, Schneider argues, ‘est un document passionnant pour comprendre le regard que Proust porte sur son œuvre à la toute fin de sa vie’.19 Schneider’s book contains insights of a psycho-bio-critical nature, but the ‘auteur’/‘autre’ dichotomy becomes somewhat strained over very nearly three hundred pages. The Lettres au duc de Valentinois, dating from 1920, were published in 2016, shortly after the high-profile publication of the Lettres à sa voisine, a collection of twenty-three brief missives sent by Proust to his neighbour, the wife of an American dentist in boulevard Haussmann, between 1908–09 and 1919.20 In addition to these discoveries, the scholarly accessibility of Proust’s correspondence will soon be greatly boosted by a collaborative project that is making digitally available some two hundred of Proust’s letters relating to the First World War, with an anticipated launch date of 11 November 2018.21 At times in Proust’s letters the initial shapes of ideas or scenarios are tested out, weighed up. Proust’s multifaceted, iterative processes of drafting, expanding, and refining his material continue to receive a great deal of attention, above all from the scholars associated with the ‘Équipe Proust’ based at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM) in Paris, directed by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer. A flavour of the breadth and insights of recent genetic criticism is richly in evidence in the special number of the journal Genesis edited by Mauriac Dyer for the Swann centenary: Proust, 1913, the entirety of which is free to access online.22 Much of the material discussed here pertains to the major project of the ‘Équipe Proust’, the ongoing preparation and publication of a complete edition of the Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France.23 The annually published journal of the ‘Équipe’, the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, edited by Mauriac Dyer, provides insights and sidelights on the work of the scholars associated with the team and the monthly seminars it runs (for the transcription of Proust’s cahiers as well as related academic papers and symposia).24 Although the high cost of the ongoing edition of Proust’s Cahiers makes its volumes inimical to most individual budgets, the full and cost-free digital accessibility, via the Gallica platform, of the Bibliothèque nationale’s ‘fonds Proust’, the manuscript cahiers, notebooks, loose pages, proof-copy, paste-ons, and so forth that are the central focus of the genetic endeavour, means that anyone with an internet connection can now access high-definition reproductions of the ink-and-paper origins of Proust’s novel.25 Philosophy The intersections of Proust’s writings with philosophy have long preoccupied readers and critics. The publication in 2013 of Luc Fraisse’s L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust, however, was a genuinely field-changing event.26 A number of influential studies appeared in the preceding years: in particular Joshua Landy’s Philosophy as Fiction, which sheds light on truth, perspective and (self-) deception, and Anne Simon’s Proust ou le réel retrouvé, which lucidly accounts for Proust’s handling of sensory experience.27 Shorter, though important, contributions have been made by Martin Hägglund’s pages on Proust in Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, which reassess major questions of temporality and desire; by Erika Fülöp in her study of ‘identity and difference’ in À la recherche; and by Jessica Wiskus in the attention she pays to Proust’s phenomenology, through a comparative lens, in The Rhythm of Thought.28 Fraisse’s L’Éclectisme stands out, though, by dint of the sheer breadth and depth of the scholarship upon which it is built. Well over 1,200 pages in length, Fraisse’s study draws abundantly on those texts Proust is known to have read or been exposed to at the Lycée Condorcet, at the Sorbonne, and later in life, as well as those he is likely to have encountered or become acquainted with. Fraisse not only constructs an incremental picture of Proust’s philosophical apprenticeship and development (alongside familiar tutelary figures such as Alphonse Darlu, Paul Janet, Gabriel Séailles, and many, perhaps less familiar, others from his readings) and provides suggestive accounts of the philosophical sources or underpinnings of various scenes from À la recherche; he also provides a rich and discerning account of the philosophical and philosophically inflected reception of Proust’s work (by Proust’s contemporaries as well as critics and thinkers including Anne Henry, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, and Anne Simon). L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust is an exceptional work of erudition that will remain a touchstone in the field for generations of scholars. Fraisse’s work combines intellectual history, reception studies, and textual criticism; a good many insights have been yielded by shorter publications contributing to one or other of these fields in the years since 2013. Jennifer Rushworth and Anna Elsner have fruitfully brought Jacques Derrida’s thought to bear on readings of Proust’s novel.29 Anne Simon’s Trafics de Proust, though less ambitious in scope than Fraisse, is every bit as accomplished in its handling and analysis of material. With perhaps a nod to Michel de Certeau, Simon modestly describes her sparkling central chapters as ‘quatre butinages différents’.30 From this foraging among the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze, and Barthes emerges a Proust who is ‘un référent majeur de leur façon de s’envisager et d’envisager l’exercice de la pensée’.31 Over and again Simon demonstrates persuasively and with great critical sensitivity how Proust’s work becomes ‘une référence en puissance, à tous les niveaux — narratif, thématique, lexical ou rythmique’.32 The arts Like philosophy — and like Proust’s novel — the arts are a house with many rooms, and this is reflected in the volume and diversity of material published in relation to Proust and the arts. The popular appeal of this domain is evinced by the recent re-issue, in paperback, of Eric Karpeles’s Paintings in Proust, whilst a more scholarly and, indeed, authoritative account of painting in Proust is found in Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa’s Proust et l’art pictural.33 Richly illustrative of the range of original responses Proust’s relations with the arts still provoke is the recent edited volume Proust and the Arts.34 Artists and topics are attended to here that one might expect in such a volume — Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Gustave Moreau, John Ruskin, Vittore Carpaccio, Richard Wagner, photography — but also others that refresh and rejuvenate a field one might have thought quite saturated.35 There are essays relating to archaeological discovery; fashion; Proust’s own drawings; Émile Gallé’s work in glass; book art and illustration; acts of listening; and, remarkably and entertainingly, Proust and the Marx brothers. Additionally, readers will garner much from the similarly stimulating Proust et les arts décoratifs,36 and from the wide-ranging Proust and the Visual.37 Sophie Basch’s sumptuously illustrated Rastaquarium: Marcel Proust et le ‘modern style’ is a hugely impressive work of cultural-historical scholarship that adds yet greater nuance to our understanding of the layers of reference Proust built into his work and their polyvalence within it.38 Dance is a minor art in À la recherche and has received little attention until recently. Áine Larkin’s chapter on ‘Theatre and Dance’ in Marcel Proust in Context surveys the cultural-historical context and attends to the most important relevant scenes in the novel, whilst a recent article by Schmid explores resonances between the radical changes in dance in the early twentieth century and Proust’s writing of À la recherche.39 Francine Goujon has considered similar material, tracing Proust’s encounters with the ballets russes and the evolution of descriptions of a dancer (most likely based on Vaslav Nijinsky) in his drafts and in the novel itself.40 Germane, too, is Schmid’s excellent trans-generic exploration of Roland Petit’s Proust-inspired ballet, Proust, ou, les intermittences du cœur.41 Schmid and Martine Beugnet broke new ground with their co-authored Proust at the Movies (2005).42 Now Thomas Carrier-Lafleur’s monograph, L’Œil cinématographique de Proust, at almost seven hundred pages of text, has made a substantive, incremental contribution to the field. Carrier-Lafleur combines detailed consideration of Proust’s awareness of and attitudes towards cinema, and of the ‘cinematic’ qualities of his novel, with analysis of cinematic adaptations of À la recherche. He also attends to wider questions of perception, reproduction, and photography.43 Very recently there has been a spike in critical interest in Proust’s relation to the seventh art as a result of the discovery by Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan of film footage of Proust himself descending the steps of the Madeleine church in Paris after the wedding of Armand de Guiche and Elaine Greffulhe in 1904. The Revue d’études proustiennes ran a number entitled ‘Proust au temps du cinématographe: un écrivain face aux médias’, including an article by Sirois-Trahan articulating and contextualizing his findings. The story went viral and for a week or two people the world over watched Proust (possibly) in motion for the first time.44 Considerable advances have also been made in our understanding of the role of photography in Proust’s aesthetics. Larkin’s contribution, Proust Writing Photography, is a standard reference now and has been followed by a range of other works staking out related ground, notably Akane Kawakami’s Photobiography and Mary Bergstein’s In Looking Back One Learns to See.45 Additionally, through a series of articles and a monograph, Kathrin Yacavone has used the study of photography to show the connections, tensions, and complementarities of Proust, Barthes, and Walter Benjamin, a nexus also explored in Katja Haustein’s Regarding Lost Time.46 Recent years have seen a welcome diversification of approaches to thinking about the role of music in Proust’s aesthetics.47 A special issue of Romance Studies, edited by Larkin, Unsettling Scores: Proust and Music, pushes beyond pondering possible models for Vinteuil’s fictional compositions.48 Instead, following Peter Dayan’s lead,49 the articles in Unsettling Scores pose questions about literary structure, texture, tradition, and experiment, and the particularities of all of these, as found in Proust’s musically informed writing. Dayan’s work is also centrally important to Joseph Acquisto’s recent study Proust, Music, and Meaning, which argues that by better appreciating how music was listened to in Beethoven’s time and in Proust’s time, one might develop a more nuanced capacity to appreciate Proust’s writing.50 Moving away from Schopenhauerian readings of music in Proust as an access route to transcendental truth (the sort put forward by Nattiez and by Anne Henry),51 Acquisto argues for the endlessly iterative nature of the listening experience as illustrative of the impossibility of comprehensive understanding, the associated frustration of which we find repeatedly in Proust’s novel (and not just in scenes of listening). The marked differences in focus and methodology between Acquisto’s study and Cécile Leblanc’s Proust écrivain de la musique underscore once more the diversity of possible responses to the same broad aspect of Proust’s work.52 Where Acquisto tends toward the theoretical and abstract, Leblanc is steadfastly empirical and rooted in a startling volume of primary and secondary reading in Proust’s manuscripts, his correspondence, and in the music writing of Proust’s time. Leblanc’s is an authoritative account of the genesis and development of the scenes relating to music in À la recherche and a significant contribution to fin-de-siècle cultural history delineating Proust’s relations to the cultural opinion formers and critics of his time. Proust écrivain de la musique is an important reminder that we still have much to learn from the study of contemporary journalism and cultural commentary. Using Proust’s correspondence as an initial guide to what he was reading or exposed to, and benefiting from the accessibility of the Gallica platform, researchers may yet have significant discoveries to make in relation to sources (critical, fictional, journalistic, medical, and so on) that may have contributed to this or that image, scene, or piece of dialogue.53 Intertextual, contextual, and thematic studies For scholars with a hunch about borrowings or allusions in or to Proust’s novel, La Petite Musique du style: Proust et ses sources littéraires is an invaluable starting point.54 The volume collects pieces by Fraisse written or published, in the main, between the early 1990s and 2010, and moves chronologically through essays on a wide range of writers from Homer, François de La Rochefoucauld, and the comte de Buffon, to contemporaries such as Romain Rolland and Anna de Noailles and later writers including Henri Michaux, Julien Gracq, and François Cheng.55 Shuangyi Li’s recent book, Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement, represents an important, transnational departure in Proust studies: Li gives substantive space to a discussion of the intertextual relations between Proust and Cheng, but also provides fascinating analysis of the reception and translation history of Proust’s novel in China, showing how translators and scholars broached the politically sensitive dimensions of the novel (such as its treatment of homosexuality and anti-Semitism).56 If the study of intertextuality seeks in part to discern what Ali Smith has called ‘the handshake between sources’,57 then a recent trend identifiable in Proust studies is the attention being paid to the handshakes, nods, and whispers between Proust’s writings and those of Barthes. Proust is a near-constant yet shifting presence throughout Barthes’s œuvre and Thomas Baldwin, in particular, through a series of articles and chapters, some already indicated, has illuminated this presence.58 The publication of Barthes’s Journal de deuil in 2009 prompted a number of intertextual analyses that highlight the role of Proust in Barthes’s coming to terms with his mother’s death.59 George Steiner, writing in the 1970s, argued that ‘Dante and Proust, like no others, give us the gossip of eternity’.60 Recent scholarship has pressed this claim and demonstrated a range of intriguing ways in which the thirteenth-century poet’s writing and thought intersect with Proust’s work.61 Rushworth’s Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch and Proust is a bold and impressive work of comparative scholarship that reminds us that conventional chronological and generic boundaries are permeable. Parallels and mutually illuminating facets of theme and stylistic practice have equally been astutely exposed by Julia Hartley.62 The wider intersections of Proust and the Middle Ages, first pointed up in Richard Bales’s groundbreaking research over forty years ago, have been explored in a veritable treasure trove of an edited volume, Proust et les ‘Moyen Âge’.63 Another period that has seen renewed attention is the First World War. Scholars now have an excellent range of sources to consult when seeking to place Proust and his novel within the context of the years 1914 to 1918, from analyses of adjustments made to the text of the novel to accommodate the upheaval of the conflict, to diachronic studies of Proust’s actions, personal and creative, during the war.64 Modernism Modernism is one of the artistic currents that cut across the period of the First World War and the borders of the nations touched by the conflict. An interesting cultural/disciplinary issue is encountered when one turns to Proust’s place in this domain, since despite its transnational, cosmopolitan credentials, modernism is a critical term with minimal purchase in the study of literature in French within the French academy. Modernist studies, however, is a booming English-language field publishing a great deal of critical material, primarily by scholars working in English or comparative literature departments.65 A handful of studies have had ‘crossover’ success and are frequently cited in scholarship on Proust, such as Sara Danius’s The Senses of Modernism, which contains a long, insightful chapter on movement and the senses in Proust.66 A recent work of notable finesse and critical verve is Hannah Freed-Thall’s Spoiled Distinctions, which reads Proust alongside Nathalie Sarraute, Francis Ponge, and Yasmina Reza.67 Much modernist scholarship, however, does not make it on to the desks or screens of those working solely on Proust, which is a pity, since there is a good deal of critical-theoretical innovation in the field. Equally, it seems that relatively little Proust criticism — textual, genetic, contextual — is read by those who identify as modernist scholars without being Proust specialists. For example, in his recent study, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man, Andrew Goldstone includes a stimulating section on the role of domestic servants, particularly Françoise, in the development of the narrator’s aesthetics in Proust’s novel. A compelling case is made, but it would have been bolstered and nuanced by reference to important, germane work by Jacques Dubois, or by Hughes in Proust, Class, and Nation.68 We find something similar in Lisi Schoenbach’s Pragmatic Modernism, which is principally a study of Gertrude Stein and Henry James, read with and through pragmatist philosophy, especially the writings of William James. A short epilogue triangulates Proust’s writing on habit with the two Jameses, offering interesting though not original connections, yet Schoenbach pays no heed to existing work on Proust and philosophy (indeed, the only critical source devoted to Proust that is cited is Beckett’s 1931 essay).69 In recent major period-specific histories the crossover has been rather better. An insightful chapter on Sodome et Gomorrhe’s curious publishing history and its connections to contemporary preoccupations with Judaism and alterity, figures in the edited volume 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics.70 Meanwhile, in his contribution to Gregory Castle’s History of the Modernist Novel, Jean-Michel Rabaté frames his chapter on ‘Modernism and the French Novel’ with references to Proust, opening with his polemic with Mallarmé in 1896 and closing with the reflection that À la recherche is a work that ultimately ‘goes beyond mere modernism’, although one wonders just how helpful this conclusion is.71 While Proust bookends that essay, he is more squarely the subject of another piece by Rabaté in The Cambridge History of Modernism, which provides a more detailed account of Proust’s position in the modernist landscape in France over the full span of his creative life.72 Lastly, it is via a consideration of Judaism and twentieth-century social life that Walter Cohen attends to Proust as a modernist, alongside Joyce and Kafka, in his recent History of European Literature.73 While Cohen’s pages relating specifically to Proust do not articulate anything previously unremarked about À la recherche, their place in the book’s larger argument, touching as it does on questions of convention and innovation, periphery and centre, otherness and community, provide a welcome encouragement to see this canonically French author as a key figure in a broader, variegated, European cultural enterprise. Creative responses Alongside the monographs and articles that appear in response to À la recherche, a modest but nevertheless valuable number of creative responses have entered the public domain in recent years, ‘nourishing’, as Baldwin puts it, ‘the desire to engage heterogeneously and intensively with À la recherche from within’.74 Besides Anne Garréta’s novel and others, which absorb, adapt, and respond to Proust in fictional forms, innovative poetic responses have also appeared that invite questions for future research about alternative shapes and forms for criticism.75 Anne Carson’s pamphlet The Albertine Workout is at once a highly intelligent critical response to gender, agency, and personal relations in Proust’s novel and an arch, playful critique of scholarly attitudes towards it.76 Clive James’s more extensive Gate of Lilacs is an intriguing echo chamber of allusion, critical reflection, and moving personal response.77 ‘I had always thought the critical essay and the poem were closely related forms’, writes James, and, indeed, in Christopher Norris’s yet more radical The Winnowing Fan, Proust flits in and out as Norris ponders writers from Mallarmé to Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Derrida.78 These responses may not be the future of mainstream criticism but they undoubtedly revitalize how we read and interact with À la recherche; they also underscore the fact of Proust’s plasticity and ineradicable plurality: his being, as Anne Simon has it, ‘un hybride à plusieurs têtes, une chimère dotée de “grappes de visages” parfois étrangers, monstrueux ou défigurés’.79 Footnotes 1 Roland Barthes, ‘Noureev et la Berma’ (1979), in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Éric Marty, new edn, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 2002), v, 628. 2 For a recent illustrative collection of reflections and responses by non-specialist scholars and creative individuals (including Chantal Akerman, Pierre Boulez, Annie Ernaux, Carlo Ginzburg, and Pierre Nora, among others), see Lire et relire Proust, ed. by Antoine Compagnon and others (Nantes: Éditions Nouvelles Cécile Defaut, 2014). This volume stems from Compagnon’s 2013 seminar at the Collège de France; a similar volume, this time stemming from a radio series broadcast on France Inter in 2013, is Un été avec Proust, ed. by Laura El Makki (Paris: Éditions des Équateurs, 2014); it includes chapters by eight scholars and novelists including Compagnon, Jean-Yves Tadié, and Julia Kristeva. 3 On the editions of the Cahiers and of Proust’s correspondence, see below. To date, two volumes of the new edition of À la recherche have appeared: La Prisonnière, ed. by Luc Fraisse (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013); and La Fugitive, ed. by Luc Fraisse (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017). Together these two volumes contain almost 500 pages of introductory material and 700 pages of comprehensive endnotes (variants are indicated as footnotes): the presentation and editorial work is at least the equal of the existing Pléiade edition with the advantage of ‘catching up’ on the scholarship produced since the publication of the latter between 1987 and 1989. See Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié and others, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89). 4 To take just two examples of recent publications that illustrate the vast spread of approaches to the novel, see the accomplished cultural-historical study by Pauline Moret-Jankus, Race et imaginaire biologique chez Proust (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016); and the pages on Proust in Marta Figlerowicz’s Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), which pose radical challenges to conventional readings of Proust; see especially ‘The Solipsist’, pp. 128–69. 5 Christopher Prendergast, Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 14. 6 Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). On Proust’s plasticity, see Anne Simon, ‘Plasticité de Proust’, in Trafics de Proust: Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze, Barthes (Paris: Hermann, 2016), pp. 7–38. Proust’s multifarious appeal is eloquently evidenced in the selected writings of Malcolm Bowie, posthumously published in 2013: Selected Essays of Malcolm Bowie, ed. by Alison Finch, 2 vols (Oxford: Legenda, 2013). Dreams of Knowledge, the first volume, contains five substantive pieces on Proust: ‘Proust and Psychoanalysis’ (1998), pp. 21–31; ‘Plutarch to Proust: Exemplary Lives’ (1998), pp. 32–45; ‘Proust and the Art of Brevity’ (2001), pp. 46–57; ‘Proust and Italian Painting’ (2004), pp. 58–80; and ‘Reading Proust between the Lines’ (2009), pp. 81–90. Another eight shorter pieces, amounting to thirty richly rewarding pages in total, are included in the second volume, Song Man, pp. 203–31. 7 See, for example, Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, 43 (2013), which focuses exclusively on the Swann centenary; Swann, le centenaire, ed. by Antoine Compagnon, Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa, and Matthieu Vernet (Paris: Hermann, 2013), stemming from the 2012 conference of the same title at Cerisy-la-Salle; D’après Proust, ed. by Philippe Forest and Stéphane Audeguy (= Nouvelle Revue française, 603–04 (2013)); Marcel Proust (= Europe, 1012–13 (2013)); and Proust Reread, ed. by Elisabeth Ladenson (= Romanic Review, 105.3–4 (2014)). A number of significant ‘hors série’ publications also appeared, usefully bringing together new and long-established critical accounts of aspects of Proust’s work: see Marcel Proust (Paris: Le Magazine littéraire, ‘Nouveaux Regards’, 2013); Marcel Proust: à l’ombre de l’imaginaire (Paris: Le Monde, ‘Hors série’, 2013); and Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu. Philosophie Magazine Hors Série, 16 (January–February 2013). Le Magazine littéraire also published a valuable forty-page dossier ‘Proust, cent ans de Recherche’, co-ordinated by Alexandre Gefen and Matthieu Vernet (Le Magazine littéraire, 535 (2013), 46–87). 8 Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Adam Watt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 181–240. On recent critical reception, see in particular Thomas Baldwin, ‘Mid-Twentieth-Century Views, 1960s to 1980s’, pp. 199–205; and Adam Watt, ‘Late-Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Responses’, pp. 206–13. 9 Marion Schmid, ‘Marcel Proust (1871–1922): A Modernist Novel of Time’, in The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists, ed. by Michael Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 327–42. 10 Michael Lucey, ‘Becoming Proust in Time’, in A History of Modern French Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, ed. by Christopher Prendergast (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 514–33. 11 Edward J. Hughes, ‘The Renewal of Narrative in the Wake of Proust’, in The Cambridge Companion to French Literature, ed. by John D. Lyons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 187–203. 12 Malcolm Bowie, Proust among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. xiv. 13 William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013 [2000]). In the preface Carter explains that, whilst some corrections have been made, no new material has been added; Carter’s discoveries since 2000 may be consulted in two related books: Proust in Love (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) and The Memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgren, Proust’s Swedish Valet, ed. by Carter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 14 Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: biographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Proust et ses amis, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2010); Le Cercle de Proust, 2 vols, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015–16). Increasingly scholars are turning to Proust’s acquaintances as subjects of study in their own right: see for example Rubén Gallo, Proust’s Latin Americans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) and Gian Balsamo, Proust and his Banker: In Search of Time Squandered (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017). 15 Jérôme Picon, Marcel Proust: une vie à s’écrire (Paris: Flammarion, 2015). 16 Marcel Proust: lettres, ed. by Françoise Leriche (Paris: Plon, 2004). Because of the inclusion of inédits and the corrections of dating made by Leriche, this volume supplements and complements Philip Kolb’s standard edition, Correspondance de Marcel Proust, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1970–93). 17 Adam Watt, Marcel Proust (London: Reaktion Books, 2013); Benjamin Taylor, Proust: The Search (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 18 Évelyne Bloch-Dano, Une jeunesse de Marcel Proust: enquête sur le questionnaire (Paris: Stock, 2017); Bloch-Dano’s life of Proust’s mother is Madame Proust (Paris: Grasset, 2004). 19 Michel Schneider, L’Auteur, l’autre: Proust et son double (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), p. 202. 20 Lettres au duc de Valentinois, ed. by Jean-Marc Quaranta (Paris: Gallimard, 2016); the letters were first published in Annales monégasques: revue d’histoire de Monaco, 39 (2015), 193–244. Lettres à sa voisine, ed. by Estelle Gaudry and Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). The collections are slim (each under ninety pages of text); Lettres à sa voisine has received considerable attention in the anglophone world, however, due to a much-publicized English translation: see Marcel Proust, Letters to the Lady Upstairs, trans. by Lydia Davis (London: HarperCollins, 2017). 21 ‘Marcel Proust’s World War I Letters: A Digital Edition’, is a collaboration between the Proust–Kolb Archive at the University of Illinois, the Université Grenoble-Alpes and the ITEM, Paris, and represents a first stage in providing a digital, open-access edition of Proust’s letters, including diplomatic transcriptions and high-resolution images of original documents. The ‘World War I Letters’ project grows out of a 2014 exhibition at Illinois; see François Proulx, ‘Proust and the Great War (Part 1)’, <https://nonsolusblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/proust-and-the-great-war> [accessed 6 March 2018]. For a detailed discussion of the background to the electronic edition of Proust’s letters mentioned above, see the article by Françoise Leriche, ‘Rééditer Proust au vingt et unième siècle: intertexte, intratexte, avant-texte’, Proust, 1913, ed. by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer (= Genesis, 36 (2013)), pp. 25–35. 22 Proust, 1913, ed. by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer (= Genesis, 36 (2013)), <http://journals.openedition.org/genesis/866> [accessed 6 March 2018]. 23 Marcel Proust, Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, ed. by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008– ). To date six volumes have appeared: Cahier 54 (2008); Cahier 71 (2010); Cahier 26 (2011); Cahier 53 (2013); Cahier 44 (2015); Cahier 67 (2017). 24 Whilst genetic approaches dominate, they are not the exclusive domain of the articles published in the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes. The journal was established in 1975; many letters, ‘dédicaces’, photographs, and documents pertaining to Proust and his writings that have been discovered since this time have appeared and been commented upon in its pages. 25 To access to the complete Gallica holdings (with the possibility of downloading individual files), see ‘Fonds Proust numérique’, <http://www.item.ens.fr/fonds-proust-numerique> [accessed 6 March 2018]. For a highly informative account of the digitization of the Proust holdings, see Guillaume Fau, ‘Le Fonds Proust au département des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale de France: notes pour un cinquantenaire’, Proust, 1913, ed. by Mauriac Dyer, pp. 135–40. 26 Luc Fraisse, L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2013). 27 Joshua Landy, Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Anne Simon, Proust ou le réel retrouvé: le sensible et son expression dans ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000; re-issued Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011). 28 Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Erika Fülöp, Proust, the One, and the Many: Identity and Difference in ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Legenda, 2012); Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-Ponty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), especially ‘Proust through the Fold of Memory’ and ‘Proust: In Search of the True Albertine’, pp. 26–38 and 66–76. 29 Jennifer Rushworth, ‘Derrida, Proust and the Promise of Writing’, French Studies, 69 (2015), 205–19; Anna Magdalena Elsner, ‘“Penser commence peut-être là”: Proust and Derrida on Animals, Ethics, and Mortality’, Modern Language Review, 111 (2016), 373–89. Derrida, alongside Freud, Barthes, and Kristeva, provides an important plank of the critical framework of Rushworth’s brilliant, connection-making comparative study, Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): see in particular ‘Proust’s Recherche, Derridean ‘demi-deuil’ and Mimetic Mourning’, pp. 91–125. Elsner draws suggestively on Freud and Derrida (among others) in constructing a fascinating account of the ethics of creativity and its links to mourning in Mourning and Creativity in Proust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 30 Simon, Trafics de Proust, p. 13. See also Michel de Certeau, ‘Lire: un braconnage’, in L’Invention du quotidien, i: Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1980; reprinted 1990), pp. 239–55. 31 Simon, Trafics de Proust, p. 35. 32 Simon, Trafics de Proust, p. 40. Thomas Baldwin offers a complementary account of Proust’s reception in the writings of Deleuze and Barthes in his chapter ‘Mid-Twentieth-Century Views, 1960s to 1980s’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Watt, pp. 199–205, and in his article ‘Félix Guattari’s Swann’, in Swann at 100 / Swann à 100 ans, ed. by Adam Watt (=Marcel Proust aujourd’hui, 12 (2015)), pp. 35–49; on neighbouring ground, see also Anne Simon, ‘Les Lignes de fuite de Swann’, in Swann at 100 / Swann à 100 ans, ed. by Watt, pp. 109–18. 33 Eric Karpeles, Paintings in Proust (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008; reprinted 2017); Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa, Proust et l’art pictural (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010). For more recent engagements with Proust and painting, see Nicolas Valazza’s chapter, ‘Proust et l’incorporation du pinceau’, in his Crise de plume et souveraineté du pinceau: écrire la peinture de Diderot à Proust (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), pp. 267–320; Luc Fraisse, ‘Du côté de chez Swann daté par sa prose d’art? Le morceau sur les clochers de Martinville’, in Écrire en artistes des Goncourt à Proust, ed. by Pierre-Jean Dufief and Gabrielle Melison-Hirchwald (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2016), pp. 193–204; and Adam Watt, ‘Portraits by the Artists as Young Men: Proust, Valéry, Colour’, in Thinking Colour-Writing, ed. by Susan Harrow (= French Studies, 71.3 (2017)), pp. 333–47. Another significant contribution is made by Davide Vago, Proust en couleur (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015). 34 Proust and the Arts, ed. by Christie McDonald and François Proulx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 35 On Proust’s relations to Ruskin, see Dictionnaire Proust–Ruskin, ed. by Jérôme Bastianelli (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017). 36 Proust et les arts décoratifs: poétique, matérialité, histoire, ed. by Boris Roman Gibhardt and Julie Ramos (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013). The chapters, too numerous to list here, broach topics from wallpaper in Le Côté de Guermantes to japonisme and the cult of Proustian objects; a valuable ‘cahier iconographique’ is included (pp. 205–32). 37 Proust and the Visual, ed. by Nathalie Aubert (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). 38 Sophie Basch, Rastaquarium: Marcel Proust et le ‘modern style’. Arts décoratifs et politique dans ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). Basch’s book is a major achievement but not without precedent: for a shorter but exacting study, see Cynthia Gamble, ‘22 rue de Provence: Siegfried Bing’s Hub of Art Nouveau Creativity and its rayonnement in the World of Proust’, in Au seuil de la modernité: Proust, Literature and the Arts. Essays in Memory of Richard Bales, ed. by Nigel Harkness and Marion Schmid (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 113–28. 39 Áine Larkin, ‘Theatre and Dance’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Watt, pp. 97–104; Marion Schmid, ‘Proust’s Choreographies of Writing: À la recherche du temps perdu and the Modern Dance Revolution’, in Swann at 100 / Swann à 100 ans, ed. by Watt, pp. 91–108. 40 Francine Goujon, ‘Les Larmes de Nijinski: un récit crypté dans À la recherche du temps perdu’, Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, 47 (2017), 89–102. 41 Marion Schmid, ‘Proust at the Ballet: Literature and Dance in Dialogue’, French Studies, 72 (2013), 184–98. 42 Martine Beugnet and Marion Schmid, Proust at the Movies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 43 Thomas Carrier-Lafleur, L’Œil cinématographique de Proust (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015). 44 See Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, ‘Un spectre passa… Marcel Proust retrouvé’, Revue d’études proustiennes, 2 (2016), 19–30. For a permanent link to the footage and a collection of links to major press coverage in English and French, as well as some reflection by biographer William Carter on the discovery, see Proust-Ink.com, ‘Was Proust Captured on Film Leaving a Wedding in 1904?’, <http://www.proust-ink.com/news/2017/2/24/was-proust-captured-on-film-leaving-a-wedding-in-1904> [accessed 8 March 2018]. This website, celebrating the life and works of Proust, is maintained by Carter and Nicolas Drogoul. See also the website Pôle Proust, established by Anne Simon, <http://poleproust.hypotheses.org> [accessed 8 March 2018], for information on publications, events, and activities relating to Proust. 45 Áine Larkin, Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Legenda, 2011); Akane Kawakami, Photobiography: Photographic Self Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé (Oxford: Legenda, 2013); Mary Bergstein, In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014). See also Emily Setina, ‘Proust’s Darkroom’, Modern Language Notes, 131 (2016), 1080–1112. 46 See Kathrin Yacavone, ‘Barthes et Proust: La Recherche comme aventure photographique’, L’Écrivain préféré, Fabula LHT, 4 (2008), <http://www.fabula.org/lht/4/Yacavone.html> [accessed 8 March 2018]; ‘Reading through Photography: Roland Barthes’ Last Seminar “Proust et la photographie”’, French Forum, 34 (2009), 97–112; Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); and ‘Photographie, écriture et mémoire: images d’enfance chez Benjamin et Proust’, Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, 44 (2014), 63–77; and Katja Haustein, Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, 2012). 47 For many years the primary touchstone has been Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Proust musicien (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984). For a survey of writing on Proust and music from the 1980s to 2012, see Julian Johnson, ‘Music’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Watt, pp. 90–96. 48 Unsettling Scores: Proust and Music, ed. by Áine Larkin (= Romance Studies, 32.3 (2014)). 49 Peter Dayan, Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). See, in particular, ‘How Music Enables Proust to Write Paradise Lost’, pp. 79–96. 50 Joseph Acquisto, Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the ‘Recherche’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 51 Nattiez, Proust musicien; Anne Henry, Proust: théories pour une esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1983). 52 Cécile Leblanc, Proust écrivain de la musique: l’allégresse du compositeur (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017). 53 Another recent study that takes such an approach most successfully is Michael Finn’s scrupulously researched Figures of the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 54 Luc Fraisse, La Petite Musique du style: Proust et ses sources littéraires (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011). 55 Fraisse does not attend to the familiar pairing of Proust and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, although this has been the subject of an illuminating book-length study: see Donatien Grau, Tout contre Sainte-Beuve: l’inspiration retrouvée (Paris: Grasset, 2013). 56 Shuangyi Li, Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement: Translation and Transcultural Dialogue (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). See also Li’s articles ‘Proust and China: Translation, Ideology and Contemporary Intertextual Practice’, Comparative Critical Studies, 11 (2014), 295–314, and ‘Transcultural Novels and Translating Cultures: François Cheng’s Le Dit de Tianyi and L’Éternité n’est pas de trop’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 53 (2017), 179–99. 57 Ali Smith, Artful (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), p. 201. 58 In addition to those mentioned above, see especially Thomas Baldwin, ‘On Barthes on Proust’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 48 (2012), 274–87; ‘Charlus/z’, Nottingham French Studies, 53 (2014), 90–101; ‘Rewriting Proust’, L’Esprit créateur, 55 (2015), 70–85; and ‘Marcel Proust, On and Off’, in Lucidity: Essays in Honour of Alison Finch, ed. by Ian James and Emma Wilson (Oxford: Legenda, 2016), pp. 121–31. 59 See Adam Watt, ‘Reading Proust in Barthes’ Journal de deuil’, Nottingham French Studies, 53 (2014), 102–12, and Jennifer Rushworth, ‘Mourning and Intermittence between Proust and Barthes’, Paragraph, 39 (2016), 269–87. 60 George Steiner, ‘Dante Now: The Gossip of Eternity’, in On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 164–85 (pp. 171–72). First published in Encounter, 46 (1976), 36–45. 61 See for example Anne Teulade, ‘Proust et l’épopée de Dante’, in Proust, l’étranger, ed. by Karen Haddad-Wotling and Vincent Ferré (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 15–36; Catherine O’Beirne, ‘Proust and the Carlylean Mediation of Dante’, in Au seuil de la modernité, ed. by Harkness and Schmid, pp. 17–37; and Adam Watt, ‘“L’air de la chanson”: Dante and Proust’, in Dante in France, ed. by Russell Goulbourne, Claire Honess, and Matthew Treherne (= La Parola del Testo, 17.1–2 (2013)), pp. 101–10. 62 Julia Hartley, ‘Reading in Dante and Proust’, Modern Language Notes, 130 (2015), 1130–49; ‘L’Analogie chez Dante et Proust’, in Marcel Proust, roman moderne: perspectives comparatistes, ed. by Vincent Ferré, Raffaello Rossi, and Delphine Paon (= Marcel Proust aujourd’hui, 14 (2017)), pp. 76–86. 63 Proust et les ‘Moyen Âge’, ed. by Sophie Duval and Miren Lacassagne (Paris: Hermann, 2015). Richard Bales’s foundational work is Proust and the Middle Ages (Geneva: Droz, 1975). 64 See Pierre-Louis Rey’s essay on the geographical shifting of Combray in the 1919 re-edition of Du côté de chez Swann, ‘Combray en Champagne’, in Swann, le centenaire, ed. by Compagnon, Yoshikawa, and Vernet, pp. 291–305; Brigitte Mahuzier’s excellent monograph Proust et la guerre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014); the dozen essays collected in Proust écrivain de la Première Guerre mondiale, ed. by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer and Philippe Chadin (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2014); and Hervé Picherit’s recent comparative study, Le Livre des écorchés : Proust, Céline et la Grande Guerre (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2016). 65 For a brief summary of the French context see Hugues Azérad, ‘Paris and the Avant-Garde’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Watt, pp. 59–66, and for the broader European background, see David Ellison, ‘Modernism’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Watt, pp. 214–20. See also Ben Hutchinson’s useful pages on Proust in Modernism and Style (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 32–38 and 135–42. 66 Sara Danius, ‘The Education of the Senses: Remembrance of Things Past and the Modernist Rhetoric of Motion’, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 91–146. 67 Hannah Freed-Thall, Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); see in particular ‘Aesthetic Disorientation in Proust’, pp. 23–90. 68 Andrew Goldstone, ‘Proust: Service in the Magic Circle’, in Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 52–65; Jacques Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social (Paris: Seuil, 1997); Edward J. Hughes, Proust, Class, and Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially ‘Masters, Laws, and Servants’ and ‘Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé’ (pp. 200–22 and 223–38). 69 Lisi Schoenbach, ‘Epilogue: Proustian Habit and Pragmatic Modernism’, in Pragmatic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 135–46. Beckett’s essay was first published as Proust (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931). The connection between William James and Proust was made at least as long ago as 1989 in Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a recent account of Proustian habit, see Erika Fülöp, ‘Habit in À la recherche du temps perdu’, French Studies, 68 (2014), 344–58. 70 André Benhaïm, ‘Odd Encounters: From Marcel Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe to Albert Cohen’s “Projections ou Après-Minuit à Genève”’, in 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics, ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 43–55. 71 Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Modernism and the French Novel: A Genealogy (1888–1913)’, in A History of the Modernist Novel, ed. by Gregory Castle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 86–109 (p. 107). Proust’s attack on Mallarmé’s aesthetics, ‘Contre l’obscurité’, can be found in Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et mélanges, et suivi de Essais et articles, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 390–95. 72 Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘French Modernism: Gide, Proust, and Larbaud’, in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. by Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 575–91. 73 Walter Cohen, ‘Jewishness and Modernist Fiction’, in A History of European Literature: The West and the World from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 407–42. 74 Thomas Baldwin, ‘On Garréta on Proust’, French Studies, 70 (2016), 33–43 (p. 43). Baldwin’s article is a study of Anne Garréta’s novel, La Décomposition (Paris: Grasset, 1999). 75 For examples besides Garréta, see Adam Watt, ‘Epilogue: Proustian Afterlives’, in The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 116–22; and, for an illustrated exploration of further diversity in the field, see Adam Watt, ‘Proust between Print Culture and Visual Art: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Works in Fiber, Paper, and Proust”’, Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 8 (2015), 179–91. 76 Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout (New York: New Directions, 2014). For an analysis of how Carson blurs the boundaries between creative writing and criticism, see Adam Watt, ‘Poetry as Creative Critique: Notes from the Desert of After-Proust (on Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout)’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 20 (2016), 648–56. 77 Clive James, Gate of Lilacs: A Verse Commentary on Proust (London: Picador, 2016). 78 James, Gate of Lilacs, p. xii; Christopher Norris, The Winnowing Fan: Verse-Essays in Creative Criticism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 79 Simon, Trafics de Proust, p. 208. The phrase ‘grappes de visages’ is taken from Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Tadié, ii (1988), p. 270. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies. All rights reserved. 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Published: Jul 1, 2018

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