Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is at once the canonical novel of French modernism and one of the ‘must-reads’ of littérature mondiale. Published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, it was translated into English by C.K. Scott Moncrieff (appearing under the title Remembrance of Things Past) between 1922 and 1931 – although Moncrieff, like Proust, died before the full project saw the light of day. While Moncrieff’s translation has been subjected to at least two thorough revisions (first by Terence Kilmartin, then by D.J. Enright), it remains, one might say, a classic of English Modernism.
Proust’s influence upon English-language writers was, and continues to be, enormous. His narrative poetics of time, memory, desire, and obsession have shaped writing in English from the 1920s onward, from Virginia Woolf, through Faulkner, to Truman Capote (this latter styled himself ‘The American Proust”).
Proustian: A style. A sentence structure. A mode of nostalgia. A certain complexity. Meditative. Discursive. Labyrinthine. Playful. Epicurean. Witty. Méchant. Campy. Profound. Queer.
This seminar will explore the qualities that have circulated as Proustian in the Anglosphere, in literature canonical and popular, in places high, middle, and low.