Studies in 20Th Century Literature (460-0-1)

Topic

The Proustian Legacy

Instructors

Scott Durham
8474914660
1860 S. Campus Drive, Crowe Hall #2-141

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 4-410: Wed 3:00PM - 5:50PM

Overview of class

Marcel Proust's work foregrounds two tasks of the work of art. First, art provides a locus for thinking our relationship to the past: it serves as the site in which the different worlds and selves through which we have passed can coexist with and communicate with one another. But for Proust art also has a privileged relation to the transformative power of the involuntary: it creates the forms through which we can articulate our relationship to the desires, sensations and events for which our existing forms of life and representation have least prepared us. This course will begin by examining the ways in which these two tasks are intertwined in Proust, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which his aesthetic and ethical elaboration of these problems situates his work in the history of modernism. In the second half of the course, we will turn to the ways in which these two tasks of the work of art are rethought in the works of three of Proust's inheritors—writer Jean Genet and filmmakers Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard—who, even as they engage Proust's legacy, can no longer presuppose the aesthetic, discursive and institutional forms of modernism. In Genet's autobiographical and political fictions, and in the cinematic works of Marker and Godard, the relationship between memory and the involuntary are intertwined in new ways, which oblige us both to rethink the place and function of aesthetic experience in culture after modernism and to reconsider the potential importance of the Proustian legacy in elaborating an aesthetic politics that resists postmodernity's dominant cultural forms.

Learning Objectives

Carry out close readings of literary and cinematic works of Proust, Marker, Godard and Genet; consider Proust's way of problematizing the relationship of thought to aesthetic forms and forms of life and how those problems are reinvented by subsequent writers and filmmakers.

Teaching Method

Seminar

Evaluation Method

Students will be graded on written work, as well presentations and active participation in class. For their written work, students will submit a standard graduate paper of 15 -20 pages at the end of the term.

Class Materials (Required)

Texts:
Proust, Du coté de chez Swann
Proust, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (2me partie)
Proust, Le temps retrouvé
Genet, Miracle de la rose
Genet, Un captif amoureux
Godard, Éloge de l'amour
Marker, Sans soleil
Marker, Le tombeau d'Alexandre
Deleuze, Proust et les signes

Class Notes

Seminar will be conducted in French