Remembrance Of Things Past Research Articles

Hybridity Denaturalized: Response to Brian Richardson’s Essay on Unnatural Narrative Theory

In Brian Richardson's essay, narratology appears as a feast of the artifice, a celebration of playfulness, aesthetic pleasure, and a wonder-producing effect of fiction (21)--all things endearing to a Nabokov scholar like myself. However, while using Richardson's very helpful examples and interpretations in my teaching (for instance, his analyses of we and multiperson narration), my students and I often detect more sophisticated concerns and functions beyond the complex forms of narration he is working on, such as problematizing essentialist conceptions of subjectivity, challenging various types of totalizing thought and language, manifesting tensions between the group and individual thinking, revealing silenced voices, introducing a sense of otherness and dialogue, and dispelling the illusion of perfect communication or universal truth as a common-sense or ideological construct. Why, then, call these complex sophisticated forms unnatural or antimimetic? Aren't they natural, from a certain perspective? Isn't fiction able to imitate, or, rather, to render and translate into its own medium (verbal, visual, or other) not only actions and thoughts of human characters in imaginary worlds but also authors' and readers' cognitive and existential concerns, aporias, and enigmas that are often hard to solve or not solvable in principle--not unlike the salesman Gregor Samsa's existential trouble of being split between the human and the bug's Umwelt (Grishakova, Beyond)? Aren't, for instance, complex forms of temporality, in a sense, more natural than simple, linear, and unidirectional ones, such as the progress model of time? Francisco Varela, in his work on specious pointed out that the Husserlian idea of complex time (past and future inherent in the mobile horizon of the present) has a neural basis. A smooth synthesis of three aspects of temporality is sometimes disturbed by internal or external factors and transforms into temporal patterns with the prevalence of past, present, or future. One may say that the complexity of neural time stemming from the multidirectional and multileveled reciprocal activation in various brain regions is biologically and neurologically more natural as compared with more recent linear or sequential models (Varela; see also Armstrong 20). In his analysis of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Genette notes that multiple time syntheses occur below and above the surface of chronology--from simple contingency of events unified through discourse sequentiality or syllepsis (temporal, spatial, thematic kinship) to different types of embedding, supralinear connection, and perspectivization (Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay 85). Chronology seems to be a marginal case among a large number of sequencing opportunities. The binary oppositions of natural and unnatural, mimetic and antimimetic may seem not entirely new to a literary scholar. They might be traced back to the Formalist distinction between and (natural, practical) language--the former as a systematic creative deformation of the latter, according to Shklovsky. Not unlike Formalism, which discovered a deviant artistic (poetic) language use in the huge mass of written and oral texts, the antimimetic or postmodernist narrative theory has attempted to separate the deviant centrifugal narrative tendencies from the natural or standard discourse. However, from the Formalist point of view, the whole poetic language (the poetic function extending also to prose fiction and, in the long run, to film and painting), rather than its certain forms or varieties, appears to be a creative deformation of the everyday language. That is why Shklovsky calls Tristram Shandy the most typical novel in world literature--by laying bare fictional conventions, the novel reveals their strangeness, which inheres in every work of fiction but is overtly displayed only in some and dies out while becoming conventional and moving to the periphery of literature. …

Dad 3

Dad 3 Gerard Malanga (bio) Stories my dad told me, but I could never figure outwhich ones. All mixed up for a kid like me, wide-eyed, sleepy head.Some Southern dialect from Puglia mostly;a rugged countrysidedotted with confino ghosts,scarred memories,reporting each morning il posto di polizia,and then the day was yours basking in the sunof your morning cappuccino. The surrounding laughter,faceless and unknown. Il giornale mattina.They didn’t tell you much.Mornings languishing into sun-dappled afternoonswhere all was quiet. Even the bluebirds remained unsung.Tutto questo tempo.This is what you would’ve done.You were one of the more lucky ones.You were not in Italy, beyond your years.You were in the Bronxtelling me more stories yet to come, as if to comeby way or mornings; the borough waking upwith the forgetfulness of dreams,with the far away and near at heart. [End Page 168] Gerard Malanga Gerard Malanga’s most recent publications are his translations of César Vallejo’s selected poems, Malanga Chasing Vallejo (Three Rooms Press) and the chapbook Tomboy and Other Tales (Bottle of Smoke Press). He is currently completing his memoirs, “In Remembrance of Things Past.” Copyright © 2015 University of Nebraska Press

‘Sand’s Way’: The Voices of George Sand’s François the Waif in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

This paper traces one of the origins of Marcel Proust’s artistic vocation in his fascination for a novel by George Sand, François le Champi (François the Waif). In Remembrance of Things Past, the adult writer explores the gradual recognition of this early phase of his formation: Sand’s novel appears in the ‘Combray’ section in Swann’s Way and it reappears at the moment of apparent illumination regarding his future as a writer in Time Regained. Leaving deliberately aside the psychoanalytic implications of the story, this article will instead emphasise the ‘vocality’ of the story, taken from the oral tradition of the provincial Berry countryside and imbued with colloquial texture, to show how the retelling of this moment in time when the novel was encountered includes a definition of what artistic vocation is for the narrator.

Repeated Injections of IL-2 Break Renal Allograft Tolerance Induced via Mixed Hematopoietic Chimerism in Monkeys.

Tolerance of allografts achieved in mice via stable mixed hematopoietic chimerism relies essentially on continuous elimination of developing alloreactive T cells in the thymus (central deletion). Conversely, while only transient mixed chimerism is observed in nonhuman primates and patients, it is sufficient to ensure tolerance of kidney allografts. In this setting, it is likely that tolerance depends on peripheral regulatory mechanisms rather than thymic deletion. This implies that, in primates, upsetting the balance between inflammatory and regulatory alloimmunity could abolish tolerance and trigger the rejection of previously accepted renal allografts. In this study, six monkeys that were treated with a mixed chimerism protocol and had accepted a kidney allograft for periods of 1-10 years after withdrawal of immunosuppression received subcutaneous injections of IL-2 cytokine (0.6-3 × 10(6) IU/m(2) ). This resulted in rapid rejection of previously tolerated renal transplants and was associated with an expansion and reactivation of alloreactive pro-inflammatory memory T cells in the host's lymphoid organs and in the graft. This phenomenon was prevented by anti-CD8 antibody treatment. Finally, this process was reversible in that cessation of IL-2 administration aborted the rejection process and restored normal kidney graft function.

That Little Room Which They Have Taken For Her

That Little Room Which They Have Taken For Her Rachel Hadas (bio) Early last summer, I had occasion to consult the episode in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in which the narrator revisits Balbec after the death of his grandmother. This well-known passage describes a rush of tears to the narrator’s eyes—tears whose source he has to search his memory to find. What he realizes is that he has just been belatedly mourning the grandmother whose death hadn’t really hit him until now. Even after I’d found the specific passage I’d been looking for, it wasn’t easy to close the book and (as a phrase nearly as annoying as the word “closure” would have it) move on. Soon, in the vicinity of the account of these tears, I came upon a longer passage I hadn’t remembered as well. In a haunting sequence, the narrator, still reeling from the shock of his belated grasp of the fact that his grandmother has died, dreams about her. In his dream she is both dead and not dead. This unsettlingly apt description (I’ll quote it soon) of the way a dream presents an indigestible reality was still much in my mind a few weeks later, when I found myself in my country house rummaging through papers. I was sifting through some folders of work I’d discarded or left unfinished—poems twenty years old, from the late 1980s and early 1990s. One short poem stopped me. It had neither title nor date, but I could easily tell more or less when I had written it, for the poem recorded a dream that had clearly presaged my mother’s death. Her cancer had been diagnosed in November 1990, and my dream preceded the diagnosis by only a few days or weeks. Indeed, the dream’s timing may well have been occasioned by some tests my mother was undergoing. I remember that when, after the last of these tests, the doctor informed me that my mother had a tumor, I told him I’d dreamed she was dying of cancer. As I recall, he seemed more interested than surprised or skeptical. Perhaps such prescient dreams are not so uncommon. Somehow, brought to light about twenty years after I had first written it, my little poem seemed more worth preserving than some of the others I’d turned up in the same folder. I gave it a title and tightened its original eleven lines to nine. Subterranean A gate that had been open closed behind me. Light was streaming into a low-ceilinged bedroom bare but for the bed and a sort of throne [End Page 70] on which I sat to hear the news from the recumbent figure calm in the face of oblivion, hands folded. She told the end herself. The gate, the tunnel, the dark dais, all had been leading toward the one conclusion. All her life, my mother was a composed, reticent, and dignified person. The dream, as preserved in the amber of the poem, has a static, formal, almost hieratic quality; emblematic or heraldic are other adjectives that come to mind. The recumbent figure recalls funerary sculpture—knights and their ladies lying in effigy, or Greek grave steles, or Egyptian statues. In keeping with the paradoxical pairing of feelings that such representations of the dead all seem to evoke—feelings about death that all people probably share—my mother, in the poem as in the dream, is somehow both alive and not alive. In order to reach her, I have to go underground, passing through a tunnel (not mentioned in the poem) and then a gate to reach the dim, low-ceilinged chamber where she is lying. Yet lying as if entombed, she is also able to receive me as a visitor and talk to me calmly and cogently—which was precisely how my mother nearly always talked. Her hands are folded heraldically across her chest; she seems almost like a statue of herself—and yet she is still my (barely) living mother. Here now is the Proust passage: But as soon as I had succeeded in falling asleep...

Writ(h)ing Bodies: Literature and Illness in Philip Roth's <em>Anatomy Lesson(s)</em>

Pain-has an Element of Blank-It cannot recollectWhen it begun-or if there wereA time when it was not--Emily Dickinson, Poem 650I know the feeling now, when I can't spina sentence and sit mumbling and turning;and nothing flits by my brain, which is asa blank window.-Virginia Woolf, Diary of Virginia WoolfWhat is the relationship between art and illness? For centuries visual arts have played an important role in the portrayal of the sick, from Rembrandt's famous Lesson1-to which Philip Roth's title obviously alludes- to Munch's The Sick Child. What can art convey about the human body, the relationship between doctors and patients, or the representation of illness? Artists have tackled the subject of illness in various ways, from line drawings to vivid portrayals of this intimate experience. Classical and modern literature is replete with characters presenting neurological, cognitive, psychiatric, or other medical conditions. Dostoyevsky's fiction, for example, abounds in details of the epilepsy from which he was suffering. Prince Myshkin in the novel Idiot is one of the best known epileptic figures in literature. An earlier example is John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), an exploration of his illness-believed to be typhus-and the spiritual journey it entailed. At times, authors of literature come to describe diseases even before they are identified by medical science. One of the best accounts of acutely progressing strokes, for instance, is in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, the disease of the narrator's grandmother remaining to this day piece of anthology (Bogousslavsky, Marcel Proust par. 1). Shakespeare's plays display various neurological and psychiatric cases. Balzac wrote in his novel Louis Lambert what could probably be considered the first accurate report of schizophrenia, decades before Kraepelin and Bleuler's first medical diagnoses of this disorder.2In her 1926 celebrated essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf argued, however, that the drama of the diseased body ought to preoccupy writers more than the ravages of war:Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions [...] literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. (4)Sixty years later, Philip Roth was taking a similar stance, claiming that modern authors of fiction had displayed great reticence about the subject of the body, and more particularly, the body shaped by illness, old age, or death: When I was writing Anatomy Lesson I made a list of novels about illness and disease. It was a short list. Cancer Ward and Magic Mountain. If you want to stretch it, you can toss in Malone Dies. There is no great body of literature on this strain of misery. Astonishing, isn't it? All those great books about adultery and none about diabetes (Searles 140). Throughout his career, Roth has addressed this particular gap by having his characters voice the story of physical suffering and illness. From his first short stories to his late novels, his work revolves around themes such as sexuality, desire, and manhood, but also addresses the body shaped by illness, old age, and death. At the same time, Roth's body of work-in particular Anatomy Lesson-constitutes a criticism of today's medical culture while it also strives to connect Western biomedicine with the patient's own (non-medical) understanding and experience of pain.Despite the presence of numerous literary texts dealing with medicine, few have had pain and illness at their core. subject of physical suffering has been for too long treated rather peripherally. …

Remembrance of Things Past: Somali Roads to Police Development

Police reform is thought to require a police force to break with its past. This is notably so in the aftermath of conflict or regime change. In practice, however, most police forces are selectively reconstituted, and their development is influenced as much by legacy issues as by international standards filtered through local norms. This article uses the experience of Somalia’s three regional police forces to reconsider the relationship between past and present projects to build police authority and capacity, and what this says about institutional memory in the absence of documentation. In Somalia, as in other clan or tribal-based societies, police development is influenced by a blend of security levels, political imperatives, pragmatism, international resources and memories of past practices, with group experience playing a more significant role than institutional memory. The only identifiable general principle is the need for political settlements and tactical flexibility – that is, for stability.

Imprinting in Organizations: New Perspectives for Unpacking the Past

Since Stinchcombe’s (1965) seminal paper half a century ago, imprinting has become an influential concept across a range of fields in organizational research, from institutional theory to organizational ecology to network analysis. This symposium brings together a diverse set of papers that help define new directions for imprinting research. Two of the papers revisit and challenge traditional assumptions implicit in many imprinting studies: the assumption that organizations founded under the same conditions will necessarily adopt similar initial structures, and the assumption that radical environmental and organizational changes will wipe out dormant imprints. The other two papers apply an imprinting lens to phenomena that were previously beyond the scope of this literature, explaining the present-day organizational ideologies of corporations and the intertwined nature of organizational fortunes and individual performance. As a set, the papers offer new insights into the mechanisms of imprinting in organizations. Failing to Imprint: The Effects of Adopting Unusual Job Structures at Startup Presenter: Lisa Ellen Cohen; McGill U. Presenter: Heather Haveman; U. of California, Berkeley The Imprinting Effects of Founding Conditions on Organizational Ideology Presenter: Abhinav Gupta; Pennsylvania State U. Presenter: Forrest Briscoe; Pennsylvania State U. Remembrance of Things Past: Linking Organizational Fortunes and Individual Performance Presenter: András Tilcsik; U. of Toronto Once Learned – Not Forgotten: Institutional Imprint Persistence in Transition Economies Presenter: Aldas Pranas Kriauciunas; Purdue U. Presenter: George A. Shinkle; U. of New South Wales

L’ÉPISTEMOLOGIE DE LA JALOUSIE : Proust et Descartes

In this article I attempt to read Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in the light of Descartes’ sceptical philosophy. Instead of a more traditional comparative study, I have opted here for what could be called a “negative” approach, allowing me to read the Recherche from a certain angle, and to uncover the presence of Descartes in some of the more out-of-the-way places of Proust’s Universe.

Remembrance of Things Past: A History of the Socratic Method in the United States

The Socratic method is a common touchstone in conversations about classroom pedagogy, widely believed to enhance student engagement and promote critical thinking. Understood as the historical inheritance of antiquity, the method is generally accepted by teachers, administrators, and scholars as a legitimate approach to instruction.As this article reveals, however, the Socratic method was not passed down from ancient Athens across continents and millennia. Instead, it was re‐created and reimagined by different groups of educators who were less concerned with establishing a consistent and specific meaning for the method than they were with using it to advance their own distinct agendas. Thus, while the Socratic method is commonly perceived as both identifiable and ancient, it is in reality a vaguely defined and relatively modern pedagogical concept—a fact that should give pause to educators presuming to employ it.

Remembrance of Things Past: The Trope of Africa in Afro-Brazilian Studies

Brazil’s African descendent population, the largest in the Americas, has attracted the attention of anthropologists since the end of the 19th century. Following the tendency of their times, early studies focused on practices that had parallels in the African continent. These practices were understood to be “survivals” that had been transported across the Atlantic intact.

Baseball and Memory: Winning, Losing, and the Remembrance of Things Past

Baseball and Memory: Winning, Losing, and the Remembrance of Things Past

The Seeds of Time

Underpinned by a cultural materialist study of the presence of Shakespeare in a series of great national festivals – the great Exhibition of 1851, the Festival of Britain in 1951, and the London Olympics of 2012 – this story uses imaginative methods to pursue a critical inquiry, combining documentary evidence and critical argument with imaginative speculation. To study Shakespeare diachronically through a time-line of national commemorations, the kind of work featured in Critical Survey 22, 2 (2010), Shakespeare and the Cultures of Commemoration, is analogous to travelling in time. Here Wells’s Time Traveller, scientist, engineer, and devotee of progress, returns to the past in search of Shakespeare, and finds in the Great Exhibition a Shakespeare surprisingly assimilated to the priorities of mechanical engineering and industrial design. Shuttling forward to 1951, he discovers similar evidence, including a steam locomotive named William Shakespeare. Inadvertently coming across the London Olympics in 2012 (by carelessly setting his GPS navigation system to ‘Stratford’), the Time Traveller encounters lines from The Tempest spoken by an impersonation of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In this story historical, critical and scholarly questions are explored imaginatively in fictional form. For a critical account of the same material, see Graham Holderness, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, in Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory, edited by Clara Calvo and Coppelia Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

The Pleasures of Reading in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Fun Home includes allusions to and graphic representations of several kinds of texts—masterworks of literary modernism and Realism, classics of homoerotic fiction and autobiography, coming-out narratives, as well as Bechdel's parents' letters and photographs, official documents, maps, and anatomical and architectural drawings. Juxtaposed in its frames as visual collage, they mediate between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures and create a visual ‘archive of feeling’ (Cvetcovich) that attests to both the forms and the power of American discourses of sexuality in the latter half of the twentieth century. The ‘network of transversals’ established in such masterworks as Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce's Ulysses, and the Odyssey generates a structure of reversals and recognitions that both contextualises, and provides enabling frameworks for interpreting the meaning of, personal events, notably the death of teenaged Alison's father and her sense of trans-generational identifications around sexuality in the family. In addition to such intellectual puzzles, the stimulus of sexual stories, as of language itself, stirs the erotic pleasures of reading in her text.

La mort de Ralph : le « moment de vérité » dans The Portrait of a Lady

Barthes quotes as instances of “moments of truth” in reading — those fulgurations in which an overwhelming emotion is conjoined to a sense of truth — two death scenes from War and Peace and Remembrance of Things Past where the coincidence between what is written on the page and what is felt by the reading subject takes place on the level of sympathy and compassion. This article purports to analyze Ralph’s deathbed scene in The Portrait of a Lady as one such “moment of truth”, in which the discourse and the truth of affect are given full play in keeping with one of the missions that Barthes assigns to the novel, namely to express, from the heart of intimacy and subjectivity, “the brilliance and suffering of the world”.

Agricultural legacies, food production and its environmental consequences

Near the end of Proust’s famous novel Remembrance of Things Past, the protagonist at last comes to understand that a person’s present can only be understood in the context of their past. In PNAS, Sattari et al. (1) remind us the same is true for ecosystems. Focusing on the present and future of agriculture, the authors argue that a legacy of excess fertilizer use has caused soil phosphorus (P) to accumulate in the world’s traditional breadbaskets and enhance recent crop yields. Further, they suggest those past P deposits can delay a potential crisis in global P supply (2). Their work is the latest contribution to a debate about one of society’s fundamental challenges: how do we feed a growing population while minimizing agriculture’s collateral damage on finite resources and the environment (3, 4)?

Remembrance of Things Past: Literary Annuals’ Self-Historicization

Literary annuals and gift books, the lavishly illustrated, richly bound anthologies of poetry and prose fashionable in England during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, attracted readers by their combination of text and pictures inside a pretty package. They typically appeared at the end of the year and were meant to be Christmas presents or tokens of remembrance between friends and family members. The first one, Rudolph Ackermann's The Forget-Me-Not for the year 1823, was inspired by the ladies' pocket-books and almanacs of the eighteenth century--themselves a development of manuscript common-place books owned by men and women since the Renaissance (1)--and the first number actually contained a diary section. The blank pages, however, disappeared within two years, and from then on The Forget-Me-Not and all the many competitors launched following its success adopted the formal features for which they would become so desired: exquisite bindings, beautiful engravings, and a miscellaneous collection of literary matter. (2) The annuals' presence on the literary scene began to subside after the mid-thirties: by the 1850s there were only eleven left and by 1860 they were basically extinct, (3) replaced by illustrated periodicals. The shift from steel engraving to wood engraving had made picture reproduction increasingly more affordable, so by mid-century annuals could no longer compete with the more modestly priced quarterlies or monthlies. (4) In addition, as Bradford Booth has suggested, their amazing proliferation might also have been instrumental in their collapse: Public support and the fecundity of British literary talent might have served a dozen volumes,--perhaps even a score,--but when sixty-odd fought for attention, the deserving were buried with the undeserving. It was a free-for-all with nothing barred, and when the smoke cleared away, all the combatants were prostrated (p. 8). But even as they replaced annuals, illustrated periodicals did not quite match their allure-an allure that, as this essay will show, rested to a extent on their self-fashioning as cultural heritage and which distinguished there from other anthologies. As several studies have stressed, anthologies--which proliferated after 1774 with the defeat of the attempt to establish perpetual literary copyright--have been considered instrumental in having fomented the very concept of an English national and the consequent emergence of a canon, the emblem of the country's cultural heritage. (5) And while this notion has been somewhat qualified by critics such as Richard Terry and Trevor Ross, the late eighteenth-century continues to be regarded as the time when anthologies began to participate in the ideological work of establishing a national culture, especially once they adopted a genealogical arrangement of the canon into a history of the national literature (Wright, p. 360n4). (6) Despite being anthologies, however, that was not the role performed by the annuals. Since they published new work rather than compiling already known texts, they remained peripheral to the nationalist, ideologically determined process critics have seen in contemporary anthologies of great works. Nonetheless, in their self-presentation--from titles to prefaces and puffs--annuals cast themselves as important historical artifacts of the then-present and hence serve as records of the literary aesthetic shift from Romantic to Victorian in process during the 1820s and 1830s. As I will argue, annuals can be seen as emblems of that time of literary transition (7)--a transition that also reflected, and in part depended on, wider transformations in printing technologies and in social class organization. Attending to this important aspect of the annuals' cultural role reveals that their allure rested to a extent on the ways in which they appropriated and embodied the contemporary preoccupation with memory and relic. (8) It indicates, furthermore, that their greatest impact in the second quarter of the nineteenth century goes beyond the literary: as a genre, annuals influenced and reflected one essential cultural aspect implicated in the formation of early-nineteenth-century middle-class identity--namely, the legitimization of the class's claims to taste and refinement. …

Remembrance of Things Past and Present: Chronological Time and Cognitive Sensibilities in Harold Pinter's Silence and The Proust Screenplay

Remembrance of Things Past and Present: Chronological Time and Cognitive Sensibilities in Harold Pinter's Silence and The Proust Screenplay

Remembrance of Things Past and Present: Chronological Time and Cognitive Sensibilities in Harold Pinter's <em>Silence</em> and <em>The Proust Screenplay</em>

Remembrance of Things Past and Present: Chronological Time and Cognitive Sensibilities in Harold Pinter's <em>Silence</em> and <em>The Proust Screenplay</em>

Proust’s Innovative Vision of Literature as Seen Through his Correspondence

Marcel Proust’s monumental correspondence is filled with information about the man Marcel Proust and his daily life, but reveals very little about his ideas on art and literature or about the novel that consumed his life, A la recherche du temps perdu. Most of his letters paint an extremely polite and even obsequious man overly concerned with pleasing his correspondents or with organizing his social life while others provide information about his personal life. When he mentions his writing, it is usually in connection with practical questions or information he is seeking. Very rarely does he discuss his novel or present his own ideas about art and literature. However, a handful of letters, out of thousands, in which he does discuss his literary project and his innovative vision of literature in some detail, show some sort of Proustian aesthetics that not only complements the theories he offers in Contre Sainte-Beuve and in Le Temps retrouve, the last volume of his novel, but also helps understand them better. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss1/4 Proust’s Innovative Vision of Literature As Seen Through his Correspondence Pascal Ifri Washington University “Avez-vous remarque que souvent les lettres d’un ecrivain sont superieures au reste de son œuvre?” (II 779) ‘Have you noticed how often a writer’s letters are superior to the rest of his work?’ (II 508), the comtesse d’Arpajon asks the guests of a dinner party in Marcel Proust’s Le Cote de Guermantes, The Guermantes Way. It is a remark that certainly does not apply to the author. His monumental correspondence, almost always hurriedly written and with no stylistic concern whatsoever, is filled with information about the man Proust and his daily life, but reveals surprisingly little about his ideas on art and literature or his novel A la recherche du temps perdu, Remembrance of Things Past. When it mentions his writing, it is usually in connection with practical questions or information he is seeking. Yet, it includes a handful of letters in which Proust does discuss his literary project or his novel in some detail or in which, trying to convince a publisher or else correcting misreadings or misunderstandings, he clearly states his novelistic intentions and explains his innovative vision of literature. Philip Kolb, the late American scholar who dedicated his life to the publication of Proust’s correspondence, estimated that the latter had written over one hundred thousand letters in his lifetime. Out of those, some 5,400, meaning about five percent, have been published. The vast majority of the others have disappeared forever, even though some new ones surface every year. A Correspondance generale of Proust was published in six volumes from 1930 to 1936, but one had to wait until the years 1970-93 to see the complete result of Kolb’s monumental work and the publication of the Cor1 Ifri: Proust’s Innovative Vision of Literature as Seen Through his Corr Published by New Prairie Press