Considered one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust was a pillar of modernist writing, as illustrated in his massive seven-volume novel, A la recherche du temps perdu.  Witness to a changing world forged in the defeat of 1870, the Dreyfus Affair, and World War I, Proust catalogued the move from a traditional nineteenth-century, still grounded in aristocratic and upper-middle-class models, to a more democratic, republican society.  In his novel, he provided analyses of social structures, family life, Parisian society, social movement, sexualities, gender roles, religion, citizenship, politics, science, and the arts. This module will serve as an introduction to Proust's work and also an introduction to the society in which he lived and to the other writers of his time in Europe. We will read portions of the "Recherche" and works by Woolf, Gide, Colette, Mann, and Svevo. 

Aims and Learning Outcomes: 

The course is intended to give students a range of analytical tools to approach European literature at the beginning of the 20th Century, such as historical, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and cultural approaches. The course aims to encourage students to think of the challenges of dealing not only with Proust’s massive novel (one million words over seven volumes) but also with the imbricated context of European literary culture in the Belle époque 

On successful completion of the module, students will be able to demonstrate: 

• critical analysis skills related to European novels of the beginning of the 20th Century; 

• the ability to compare the different literary and cultural contexts of France, Germany, Italy, and the UK; 

• an advanced ability to use scholarly sources; 

• the capacity to develop questions related to interdisciplinary research. 

Suggested Reading: 

Primary Texts (in English and in original languages) 

Proust, (Du côté de chez Swann 

A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur 

La Prisonnière 

Le temps retrouvé) in In Search of Lost Time, Ed. Christopher Prendergast, London: Penguin, 2003. and A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris : Gallimard (various editions). 

Colette, Chéri. London: Vintage Classics (2001). 

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice. London: Vintage Classics (2001). 

André Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters). London : Penguin Modern Classics, 1990). 

Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience). London : Penguin Classics, 2019. 

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. London: Vintage Classics Woolf Series, 2016. 

Secondary works 

Bal, Mieke. The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually. Stanford : Stanford UP,  

   1997. 

Bataille, Georges. « Proust » in La Littérature et le mal. Paris : Gallimard, 1957. 

Barthes, Roland.  “Proust et les noms” in Le degré zéro de l’écriture. Paris : Seuil,  

   1972  

Bersani, Leo. Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art. New York: Oxford       

   University Press, 1965 

Beugnet, Martine and Marion Schmidt. Proust at the Movies. London: Ashgate, 2005.  

Blanchot, Maurice. Le livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. 

Bowie, Malcolm. Freud, Proust, and Lacan. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,  

   1987. 

---. Proust among the Stars. New York : Columbia University Press, 1998. 

Bray, Patrick M. The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century French  

   Fiction. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, January 2013. 

---. “Forgetting the Madeleine: Proust and the Neurosciences.” In Literature,  

    Neurology, and Neuroscience: History and Modern Perspectives. Eds. Anne Stiles,  

   Stanley Finger, and François Boller. Progress in Brain Research Vol 205,  

   Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2013. 

---. “The ‘Debris of Experience’: the Cinema of Marcel Proust and Raoul Ruiz.”  

   Romanic Review, 101:3 (May 2010) 469-484 (Appeared winter 2012).  

---. “Deleuze’s Proust et les signes” Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism,  

   edited by Paul Ardoin, S.E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison. London: Bloomsbury,  

   2014, 11-20. 

Carter, William C. The Proustian Quest. New York : New York University Press, 1992. 

Collier, Peter. Proust and Venice. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989. 

Compagnon, Antoine. Proust between Two Centuries (Goodkin, R., Trans.). New York:   

   Columbia University Press, 1992. 

---. La ‘Recherche du temps perdu’ de Marcel Proust in Nora, P. (Ed.), Lieux de mémoire,  

   vol. 3. Gallimard, 3835-3869. (Original work published 1992). 

Debray-Genette, Raymonde, ed. Essais de critiques génétiques. Paris : Flammarion,  

   1979. 

Deleuze, Gilles.  Proust et les signes.  Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. 

DeMan, Paul. « Reading (Proust) », Allegories of Reading. New Haven : Yale University  

   Press, 1979. 

Descombes, Vincent. Proust. Philosophie du roman. Paris : Minuit, 1987. 

Doubrovsky, Serge. La Place de la madeleine. Paris : Mercure de France, 1974. 

Ellison, David. Three Readings of Proust. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press,  

   1984. 

Ender, Evelyn, Architexts of Memory. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2005. 

Genette, Gérard. Figures I (notamment, « Proust Palimpseste », « Espace et langage ».   

   Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966 

---. Figures II (« Proust et le langage indirect »).  Paris: Seuil, 1969 

---. Figures III (« Métonymie chez Proust », « Discours du récit »).  Paris : Seuil, 1972. 

Gray, Margaret. Postmodern Proust. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press,  

   1992.  

Henry, Anne. Marcel Proust : Théories pour une esthétique. Paris : Klincksieck, 1981. 

Kleeblatt, Norman, ed. The Dreyfus Affair : Art, Truth, and Justice. Berkeley : University  

   of California Press, 1987. 

Kristeva, Julia. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature.  Translated by     

   Ross Guberman.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.   

Kritzman, Lawrence D.  “Barthes’s Way: Un Amour de Proust.”  The Yale Journal of  

   Criticism.  14.2. 2001, 535-543.    

Landy, Joshua. “Les Moi en Moi ”: The Proustian Self in Philosophical Perspective.”   

   New Literary History 2001, 32: 91 –132. 

Lucey, Michael, Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing, Oxford University Press,  

   1995, chapter 4.  pp. 108-142.  

---. Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide and Proust, Duke  

   University Press, 2006. 

McDonald, Christie.  The Proustian Fabric: Associations of Memory.  Lincoln:   

   University of Nebraska Press, 1991. 

Mehlman, Jeffrey. A Structural Study of Autobiography: Proustm Sartre, Leiris, Lévi- 

   Strauss. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. 

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Proust musicien. Paris : Christian Bourgois, 1984. 

Poulet, Georges. L’espace proustien.  Paris: Gallimard, 1963. 

Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris : Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la   

   Pléiade, 4 vols., 1987-89. 

---. Contre Sainte-Beuve. Ed. bernard de Fallois. Paris : Gallimard, 1954. Rev. Ed. Pierre   

   Clarac, 1971. 

Richard, Jean-Pierre. Proust et le monde sensible. Paris : Seuil, 1974. 

Rushworth, Jennifer. Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 

Ricœur, Paul. Temps et récit II. La configuration dans le récit de fiction. Paris : Seuil,  

   1984.   

Shattuck, Roger. Proust’s Binocular’s: A Study of Memory, Tine, and Recognition in A   

   la recherche du temps perdu.  New York: Random House, 1963 

Tadié, Jean-Yves. Proust et le roman. Essai sur les forms et techniques du roman dans A  

   la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.  

Terdiman, Richard. Present, Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1993. 

 