The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [87]
4 See William J. Thompson, ed., French XX Bibliography, XII, 57–60 (2005–9).
5 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’ (1929), in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (1999), pp. 197–210 (206, 207).
6 Samuel Beckett, Proust (reprinted with Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, 1987), p. 91.
7 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1979), p. 135.
8 Barthes’ essay ‘Proust et les noms’ [Proust and Names] (1967) is a vital contribution to the study of Proust’s attitude to language as well as the style and structuring of the novel.
9 ‘Roland Barthes contre les idées reçues’ (1974), in Œuvres complètes, 3 vols., ed., Éric Marty (1994), III, pp. 70–4 (74).
10 Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (1973), p. 22. Readers curious about the place of Proust in Barthes’ writing should consult Malcolm Bowie, ‘Barthes on Proust’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14 (2001), 513–18 and Anne Simon, ‘Marcel Proust par Roland Barthes’, in M. Carbone and E. Sparvoli, eds, Proust et la philosophie aujourd’hui (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2008), pp. 207–21.
11 Jean-Pierre Richard, Proust et le monde sensible (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 240.
12 Richard, Le Monde sensible, p. 263. For an acute assessment of the various positions taken in the criticism of the time with respect to the nature and status of Proust’s text, see Florian Pennanech, ‘Le Temps retrouvé et la Nouvelle Critique: le problème de l’achèvement’, in Adam Watt, ed., Le Temps retrouvé Eighty Years After: Critical Essays/Essais critiques (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 239–53.
13 Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible (Paris: Gallimard ‘Folio Essais’, 2000), p. 372.
14 Additionally readers of French should consult Anne Simon’s Proust ou le réel retrouvé [Proust or the Rediscovered Real] (2000; new edition 2010), which offers a reading of Proust’s conception of reality, aligning it with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61).
15 On irony, see Sophie Duval’s excellent L’ironie proustienne: la vision stéréoscopique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004) and on humour, Maya Slater, Humour in the Works of Proust (Oxford University Press, 1979).
16 Paul De Man’s influential essay ‘Reading (Proust)’, in his Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), is an important deconstructive reading of Proust’s use of tropes, focusing on what he interprets as the fundamental un-readability of metaphor.
17 See J. M. Cocking, Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and his Art (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
18 See Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005).
19 See also the essay collection edited by Jean Milly and Rainer Warning, Marcel Proust: Écrire sans fin (Paris: CNRS, 1996) and Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, Proust inachevé: le dossier ‘Albertine disparue’ (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005).
Epilogue: Proustian afterlives
1 These cover ‘Combray’, ‘Swann in Love’ (2 vols.) and Within a Budding Grove (2 vols.), published in Paris by Delcourt and in English translation by NBM in New York.
2 For an intelligent, critical account of the commodification and ‘kitschification’ of Proust, see Margaret Gray’s chapter ‘Proust, narrative and ambivalence in contemporary culture’, in her Postmodern Proust (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
3 The Society’s web-page (http://pagesperso-orange.fr/marcelproust/sommaire_marcel_proust.htm) includes a complete list of articles and reviews published in their Bulletin since its inception in 1950.
4 For an overview of the work of the Équipe Proust, see www.item.ens.fr/index.php?id=13857.
5 A further publication of interest with regard to the present state of Proust studies is Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui – a bilingual annual review, first published in 2003, that alternates themed issues with general issues and presents the work of francophone and anglophone scholars on a wide range of topics relating to Proust’s life and work.
6 So far Cahiers