First Paper Topics
Forms of Narrative 2022
DUE SATRUDAY SEPTEMBER 24 by 11:59 p.m. Email it to me at
"Genetterate" Your First Paper Topics on Proust
Your paper will be approximately 500 words, not counting whatever you quote from Genette or Proust.
Paper Topic:
Select one of Genette's one sentence generalizations about Proust's Recherche in "Proust Palimpsest."
Then select a short passage (even a sentence or a clause in a sentence) or a small part of a big passage with a metaphor in it from either "Combray" or in the assigned pages fromTime Regained (aka Finding Time Again). (Do not select any part of the Recherche Genette disusses.
Show how your selection proves Genette right. Make his generalization your own. Illustrate it with your selection.
If you are having reading comprehension difficulties with Proust or Genette, do not feel bad. We are reading very challenging material. I would like to ask you to note specific sentences you are finding difficult in any reading. We will sort out the syntax. Students who have not been speaking up in class should do so. I have advised the co-leaders to call on you. We want / need to hear from you
READING COMPREHENSION as the way to generating paper topics: One way you can help establish how well you have understood a reading by a critic is to identify the thesis sentence. In "Metonymy and Proust," Genette's thesis comes at the end of the second paragraph. Then identify the main supporting sentences. Genette is very clear. He goes immediately from his thesis to two examples to illustrate. Then he develops and further supports his thesis. Then look at the concluding paragraph. What is the critic's conclusion? Notice that Genette does not restate his initial thesis about Proust. Instead, he uses Proust's novel to establish an entirely new thesis about narrative. To raise and answer these kinds of questions when you read De Man's essay on Proust, you will have to read it twice. You can always skim it once you have a basic grasp of it and see more deeply into the structure of the essay. Proust, Genette, De Man were all incredibly gifted writers and brilliant thinkers. When reading any of the assigned materials, it's always important to understand not only the paraphrasable meaning, or substance of the reading, but to appreciate how the substance is delivered by the writing itself. Poetry (literature) and criticism that is truly literary is what cannot be paraphrased. FYI brooks-cleanth/heresy-of-paraphrase. Though the substance of "Metonymy and Proust" may be difficult to understand, the exposition of the essay is crystal clear. It is an exemplary work of criticism, and in this respect could not be more reader friendly.
Once you have a good grasp of a work of criticism, paper topic can emerge. For example, at the end of "Metonymy and Proust," Genette talks about where narrative begins. Yet he does not specify, as far as I can tell, where the narrative of the novel begins or begins again. Genette says that the Recherche should not be regarded as a closed work. But can it ever be opened? Could one rightly argue (your thesis) that Genette has paradoxically closed the Recherche at the exact moment is trying to open it precisely where narrative begins? Where do Proust's figures of speech end and the narrative of the Recherche begin? Focus on one of the examples from Proust that Genette gives or on another of your own choice.
And another paper topic: What counts as the main narrative of the Recherche and a digression from it? Is the novel one long series of digressions? Or do digressions begin and end? Choose a specific passage from the novel to make your case.
And another paper topic: How much authority is Proust (the writer) asking us to grant the narrator / Proust when he writes about art and literary criticism in the library scene in Time Regained? Is the narrator / Proust to be taken at his word, without question, as a complete authority? Is the narrator's discussion of "aesthetic theory" clearly opposed to the narrative that tprecedes and follows it? Or are there ways in which the narrator / Proust discusses his theory that get in the way of his theory, undermine, complicate it. "Ways" might be description, figures of speech, and / or narration. Again, focus on a specific passage in the novel to make your case.
Using an analogy to reduce Proust's novel is not a good idea. Please don't do this. Or try not to do this.
"If someone were to suggest that the texture of Proust's novel resembles nothing
quite so much as molasses, it would be difficult to dissent with any great
conviction. The over-long book, with its over-long sentences, over-long paragraphs,
over-long sections and over-long volumes, is as thick and viscous as treacle, and
little more transparent; it expands not only in all directions but also, and especially,
in every dimension, so that its excess is ultimately one of density rather than one
of magnitude. And its sweetness, as one of its earliest tasters was quick to point
out, is best sampled in very small doses. 'Reading cannot be sustained for more
than five or six pages,' writes Jacques Normand; 'one can set down as a positive
fact that there will never be a reader hardy enough to follow along for as much as a
quarter of an hour, the nature of the author's sentences doing nothing to improve
matters.' Forced to compose a report for the Fasquelle publishing house in 1912,
the same Normand ends up reduced to exquisite despair. 'After the seven hundred
and twelve manuscript pages,' he complains, 'after infinite amounts of misery at
being drowned in a sea of inscrutable developments and infinite amounts of
maddening impatience at never returning to the surface - one has no notion, none,
of what it's all about.'
--Landy, Joshua. "The Texture of Proust's novel," In The Cambridge Companion to Proust, edited by Bales, Richard, 117-134; to pp. 117-18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
It may be impossible not to use a single anaology when discussing Proust. De Man quotes approvingly from George Poulet, who uses the metaphor of "layers" to describe the Recherche. But the anaology does not have to be reductive and dismissive, as Landy's is.
SECOND PAPER TOPICS: CRITICAL WAYS OF READING (AND NOT READING) ProUST
A gifted critic, Theordor Adorno, says here on Proust should and should not be read:
"At one point Proust extols the medieval masters who introduced ornaments into their cathedrals so hidden that they must have known that no human being would ever set eyes on them. Such unity is not one arranged for the human eye but rather an invisible
unity in the midst of dispersion, and it would be evident only to a divine
observer. Proust should be read with the idea of those cathedrals in
mind, dwelling on the concrete without grasping prematurely at something
that yields itself not directly but only through its thousand facets.
This is why I do not want merely to point out the ostensible high points
of his work, nor to advance an interpretation of the whole that would at
best simply repeat the statements of intention which the author himself
inserted into his work. Instead, I hope through immersion in fragments
to illuminate something of the work's substance, which derives its unforgettable
quality solely from the coloring of the here and now. I believe I
will be more faithful to Proust's own intention by proceeding in this way
than by trying to distill it and present it in abstract form."
Adorno does not consider another way of reading Proust, namely, the way Proust read his work in his synopses of each one of the seven volumes of the Recherche.
Books are often divided by tables of contents and indexes. Proust has divided his up in his tables of contents, some of which have enigmatic titles, like "Place Names: the Places" and Place Names: the Names." But Proust does not give indexes. (Some editors have posthumoulsy supplied indexes of places and characters' names.) In his synopses follows his table of contents and gives something like indexes by identifying page numbers for his subdivisions. But Proust is alone among all novelists, to my knowledge, in identifying the subdivided parts in hetereogenous and idiosyncratic ways. He subdivides each section in two ways: first, by adding italicized subtitles in his synopses; and second by providing no logic for his labels for for the number of subdivisions. Proust's resumes of "Combray (1 and 2)" are much shorter than is his resume of "Swann in Love." And these subdivisions are potentially infinite. Proust, or some times his editors or his English translators, sometimes cross-references other pages. And he sometimes assigns something like six pages for one entry and sometimes gives something like six entries for the same page. They do not follow a temporal sequence of episodes or moments that make up the plot. They do not follow the description of episodes or moments. The famous steeples of Saint Hilarie are identified only as "the church." They do not always follow the order of pagination. They do not approximate the experience of reading the novel in linear order or any temporal order (of course, reading does not mean reading letter by letter or word by word.
Lydia Davis adds her own cross-references in her translation of Swann's Way. She ends the second of part of Combray with the same word, namely, "awakenings," with which she began the first part of of Combray, crossing them as "(190; cf. 4)" and "(4, cf. 190).
The synopses often do not not match the narrative events of the novel, nor are memories like the one of the petite madeleine linked to the exansive metaphors through which they are called up.
The 1954 Pleiade published the Recherche in three volumes. At the end of the third volume, the resumes for all three volumes are followed by an index of names and places for all three volumes.
The 1954 edition akso includes subtitles under its chapter titles, not common but used consistently if used across volumes. There is expectation of uniformity, just as there is an expectation that book chapters approximate the same length.
The titles of all seven volumes of the Recherche are macro-divisions,
Following Genette's notion of the Proustian paratext, we might say that the synopses are paratexts in need of a paratext, a sort of metaparatext that would give an explanation of the purpose and intended use by the reader. Proust's resumes are at once paratexts and anti-paratexts, or what we might call "self-negating paratexts."
I want you to consider a series of questions about Proust's way of reading. What can one do or not do with these synopses? Is it impossible to do anything with them?
They are certainly not guide books like Terence Kilmartin's In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained Reader’s Guide or Patrick Alexander, Marcel-Proust's-Search-for-Lost-Time A-Readers-Guide-to-Remembrance-of-Things-Past (Vintage 2009)
Here are pdf's of all seven of Proust's synopses taken from the Viking / Penguin edition, Christopher Pendergast editor. Do they work? If so, how so?
Here is Proust's resumé, or summary he put at the end of Swann's Way