Subversion, Refraction and the Do-It-Yourself Proust: Autobiographical Intertexts of LA RECHERCHE

Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Van Tuyl, Jocelyn

Keywords

Proust, Marcel, Makine, Andreï, Barthes, Roland, Autobiography

Area of Concentration

French

Abstract

This thesis is interested in the way in which experimental autobiographies and semi-autobiographical fictions establish an intertextual relationship with Marcel Proust’s À La Recherche du temps perdu. The primary texts of this thesis each invoke a different Proust to achieve varied goals. Roland Barthes refracts Proust, Proustian iconography, and Proustian style in his post-structural hybrid text Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, which shifts between the generic tropes of memoir, photo-essay, literary criticism and theory. Russian-born writer Andreï Makine’s semi-autobiographical novel Le Testament français establishes a complex intertextual dialogue with La Recherche in order to interrogate its cultural specificity, exchanging Proust’s emphasis on time for an inquiry into language. A number of very recent pop-cultural works, including Phyllis Rose’s memoir A Year of Reading Proust, Alain de Botton’s parodic self-help book How Proust Can Change Your Life, and André Aciman’s collection of personal and literary essays in The Proust Project, to engage Proust and the reading of La Recherche. Through an inquiry into these texts, this thesis traces the evolution of Proust as a literary figure and La Recherche in changing historical moments and literary contexts.

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