The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [79]
Michael Sprinker’s History and Ideology: ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ and the Third French Republic (1994) is a forceful Marxist account of the presentation of society in Proust’s novel that illustrates the socio-historical import of this paradigmatically ‘literary’ text. Readers of French should also study Jacques Dubois’s elegant, incisive Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social (1997). Dubois suggests that in Albertine we find a figure that permits Proust to explore sociality, to engage in a sort of experimental sociology, which is often ignored by those who see the Search straightforwardly as a roman d’analyse.
Essay collections
A number of volumes of essays dedicated to Proust exists, such as The Strange M. Proust mentioned above, which bring together papers by experts around a given theme or topic. Benhaïm’s book considers the enduring strangeness and intrigue of Proust’s work, sometimes lost from view when it is considered as being monolithically ‘about’, say, time or memory. Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions (2002), consisting of essays stemming from the millennial conference held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (where Philip Kolb, editor of Proust’s correspondence, spent his career and left a vitally important research collection), is another valuable source of insights. Topics broached include the editing of the correspondence; biographical issues; genetic approaches to specific episodes; inter-textuality; and the role of visual art and music. The volume I edited, Le Temps retrouvé Eighty Years After/80 ans après: Critical Essays/Essais critiques (2009) provides a rich and varied assessment of the culminating volume of the Search, including considerations of Charlus’s role, the place of ‘theory’ in the novel, its critical reception and its ‘afterlife’ in Raoul Ruiz’s filmic interpretation of 1999. Finally, the collected papers from Antoine Compagnon’s 2006–7 Collège de France seminar have recently appeared as Proust, la mémoire et la littérature (2009), a volume whose sparkling essays bring new energy to long-studied topics.
Genetic criticism
Genetic criticism is one of the major developments in Proust studies in the last forty years. It concerns itself with how a literary work of art comes into being: its primary objects of study are manuscripts, typescripts, notes and drafts that reveal the stages of development a work goes through, between the writer’s mind and the ‘finished’ version you hold in your hands. Marion Schmid’s essay in the Cambridge Companion is an excellent place to start for an overview of the field. Scholars have been able to scrutinize Proust’s manuscripts since their acquisition by the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1962. Of many studies to date that have mined the holdings in this collection, most accessible are Alison Winton (Finch)’s Proust’s Additions: The Making of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (1977), which explores the evolution of the novel during the war years and after, tracing how Proust’s shifting preoccupations map on to the developments of the ever-expanding manuscripts; and Anthony Pugh’s The Birth of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (1987), which seeks to plot how the Narrator’s struggle to find a form for his art relates to Proust’s own challenges in the vital creative period of 1908–9, as he sought to manage his material and manipulate it into something resembling a novel. Specialists will long be consulting Pugh’s vast follow-up study, The Growth of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’: A Chronological Examination of Proust’s Manuscripts from 1909 to 1914 (2 vols., 2004), which undertakes the monumental task of giving a reasoned assessment of how the individual components