On "This" and "That" in Proust: Deixis and Typologies in À la recherche du temps perdu

Eagle, Christopher

doi:10.1353/mln.2006.0094

Cited by 5 publications

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“…But À la recherche exhibits far more ambivalence on the subject than either side acknowledges; it is no coincidence that it was composed during precisely the period when modernists were wrestling with the threat and promise of typicality, for the problem of the typical, above all in people and in art, runs through the entire novel and connects most of its principal themes. 12 One critic to acknowledge this ambivalence is Christopher Eagle (2006), who explains it by assigning the typological impulse to Marcel-under the influence of Balzac and represented by the recurrent phrase "one of those"-but the particularising instinct to Proust; the latter, Eagle argues, parodies and subverts the former. He does not extend his analysis to the more oblique deictic en être, "to be one of them" or "one of us," a leitmotiv of Sodome et Gomorrhe that prompts a moment of alarm when M. Verdurin warmly tells the Baron de Charlus: "j'ai compris que vous «en étiez»" ("I understand you are one of us," 3.332 / 2.973).…”

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Proust, Typical Novelist: Literary Context as Type

Ossa-Richardson¹

2022

Modern Language Quarterly

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A decade ago Rita Felski argued that reliance on context shuts down a text’s meaning by enclosing it in a restrictive historical “box” and alienating its individuality. This essay offers a rebuttal to Felski’s critique, first by delineating the genealogy of her concerns in literary, philosophical, and architectural thought of the late nineteenth century, and second by exploring an alternative model of context as type, as revealed by a close reading of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust’s novel repeatedly makes use of a notion of the type (a person, an artwork, a battle) that prioritizes the act of typifying, an act that does not sacrifice but discloses, or even constitutes, the individual. Like the Proustian type, context is best understood not as an alienation from, but as a route to, the particularity of the literary object.

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Proust, Typical Novelist: Literary Context as Type

Ossa-Richardson¹

2022

Modern Language Quarterly

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Generating Life from Literature: Proust in Balzac’s Aquarium

Abele

2023

Dix-Neuf

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Zut, zut, zut, zut : Aesthetic Disorientation in Proust

Freed-Thall¹

2009

mln

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Critics from Bourdieu to Bersani have emphasized a redemptive logic governing Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. This essay investigates an alternative, non-appropriative paradigm for reading in Proust—an aesthetics of the unqualifiable, or “quelconque” (“whatever”). I argue that the most striking aesthetic experiences in the novel are those that expose the critic’s incapacitation in the face of the incomparably commonplace object. At stake here is not the compensatory, self-aggrandizing aesthetics of involuntary memory, but a mode of ravished attention to the ordinary that spoils the profits of distinction.

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On "This" and "That" in Proust: Deixis and Typologies in À la recherche du temps perdu

Cited by 5 publications

References 5 publications

Proust, Typical Novelist: Literary Context as Type

Proust, Typical Novelist: Literary Context as Type

Generating Life from Literature: Proust in Balzac’s Aquarium

Zut, zut, zut, zut : Aesthetic Disorientation in Proust

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