Starting from Nicholas Zurbrugg’s dismissal of the negative ‘B-Effect’ in postmodernism, which he associates with ‘Benjamin, Brecht, Beckett, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu’, this essay examines the common rationale behind convergent affirmations of a neutrality or minimalism, often mistaken for nihilism, at key junctures in the works of Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes, adding Maurice Blanchot as a critical link. The argument unfolds along a double axis: it first considers the formal role of ‘chatter’ or ‘idle speech’ and the fragment(ary in writing) in the three ‘B-writers’ before relating them to different constructions of temporality, such as the ‘future anterior’ and the après-coup, in their thematizations of ‘catastrophe’ and ‘disaster’ as indirect responses to personal or historical trauma and death. A brief concluding paragraph highlights how time’s suspensiveness leads to different forms of waiting across Barthes, Blanchot and Beckett.
{"title":"B Effects: Bonds of Form and Time in Barthes, Blanchot and Beckett","authors":"Laurent Milesi","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0394","url":null,"abstract":"Starting from Nicholas Zurbrugg’s dismissal of the negative ‘B-Effect’ in postmodernism, which he associates with ‘Benjamin, Brecht, Beckett, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu’, this essay examines the common rationale behind convergent affirmations of a neutrality or minimalism, often mistaken for nihilism, at key junctures in the works of Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes, adding Maurice Blanchot as a critical link. The argument unfolds along a double axis: it first considers the formal role of ‘chatter’ or ‘idle speech’ and the fragment(ary in writing) in the three ‘B-writers’ before relating them to different constructions of temporality, such as the ‘future anterior’ and the après-coup, in their thematizations of ‘catastrophe’ and ‘disaster’ as indirect responses to personal or historical trauma and death. A brief concluding paragraph highlights how time’s suspensiveness leads to different forms of waiting across Barthes, Blanchot and Beckett.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42251765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What becomes visible when we consider À la recherche du temps perdu from the vantage point of the beach? This article contends that Proust's beach resort, Balbec, stages a reconfiguration of social ritual and corporeal style. Balbec is both an enormous casino and the ‘springboard’ for a loosely scripted, habit-disrupting social choreography. In contrast to both the aristocratic salons of Paris and the bourgeois family nucleus that characterizes Combray, Proust's beach is an improvisatory space. As such, it facilitates place-based, contingent (rather than congenital) forms of queer movement and desire.
{"title":"Proust on the Beach","authors":"hannah freed-thall","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0388","url":null,"abstract":"What becomes visible when we consider À la recherche du temps perdu from the vantage point of the beach? This article contends that Proust's beach resort, Balbec, stages a reconfiguration of social ritual and corporeal style. Balbec is both an enormous casino and the ‘springboard’ for a loosely scripted, habit-disrupting social choreography. In contrast to both the aristocratic salons of Paris and the bourgeois family nucleus that characterizes Combray, Proust's beach is an improvisatory space. As such, it facilitates place-based, contingent (rather than congenital) forms of queer movement and desire.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46512835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Françoise Bazireau, alias ‘Françoise’, the illiterate servant of the Recherche, unable to express her most intimate feelings in good French, nevertheless shows the narrator that she possesses all the codes to survive and even thrive in the Guermantes’ way. Exasperating like Albertine as a love object, she also manages, like Mme Verdurin and the Duchesse de Guermantes, the social and temporal capital of the novel. With this remarkable and underrated character, we move, as readers, from the intratextual level of the narrator — watching her from his point of view — to that of the novel itself, watching the two in a kind of love/hate duet that throws some light on the function of the ‘petit peuple’ in the Recherche.
{"title":"Françoise's Way","authors":"B. Mahuzier","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0385","url":null,"abstract":"Françoise Bazireau, alias ‘Françoise’, the illiterate servant of the Recherche, unable to express her most intimate feelings in good French, nevertheless shows the narrator that she possesses all the codes to survive and even thrive in the Guermantes’ way. Exasperating like Albertine as a love object, she also manages, like Mme Verdurin and the Duchesse de Guermantes, the social and temporal capital of the novel. With this remarkable and underrated character, we move, as readers, from the intratextual level of the narrator — watching her from his point of view — to that of the novel itself, watching the two in a kind of love/hate duet that throws some light on the function of the ‘petit peuple’ in the Recherche.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46941359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The introduction to this special issue sketches out some urgent forms of intelligibility that Proust's Recherche might hold for readers in 2022 given the many crises of the present moment. Whereas Proust's novel is often read as an investigation and valorization of various forms of subjective experience, contributions to this special issue consider how aspects of the Recherche's composition might provoke us to step back and objectify subjective experience in the service of some other kind of knowledge. The introduction juxtaposes Proust's novelistic practice with Pierre Bourdieu's sociological construction of points of view. We see the social world in limited ways because we see it from a single point of view, but we can work critically to rise above those limits and envision a social field of different points of view. The introduction demonstrates how Proust's novel, like Bourdieu's sociological practice, models this form of understanding for us.
{"title":"Introduction: Proust's Modernist Sociology","authors":"Michael E. Lucey","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0382","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction to this special issue sketches out some urgent forms of intelligibility that Proust's Recherche might hold for readers in 2022 given the many crises of the present moment. Whereas Proust's novel is often read as an investigation and valorization of various forms of subjective experience, contributions to this special issue consider how aspects of the Recherche's composition might provoke us to step back and objectify subjective experience in the service of some other kind of knowledge. The introduction juxtaposes Proust's novelistic practice with Pierre Bourdieu's sociological construction of points of view. We see the social world in limited ways because we see it from a single point of view, but we can work critically to rise above those limits and envision a social field of different points of view. The introduction demonstrates how Proust's novel, like Bourdieu's sociological practice, models this form of understanding for us.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43644931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article attempts to think historically about the relationship between nationalism and same-sex sexuality in Proust's novel and in readers’ responses to the novel from the time of its publication to the present. The article uses a column written on the first part of Sodome et Gomorrhe by nationalist literary critic and author Binet-Valmer in 1921 in order to illuminate some of the sexual and political contexts of Proust's representation of same-sex sexuality. It then turns to two twenty-first-century uses of Proust by right-wing thinkers to theorize a particularly French, anti-communitarian, anti-politically correct form of homosexuality. Ultimately, these examples demonstrate that there is no one relationship between same-sex sexuality and nationalism or the national community; rather, same-sex sexuality often serves as a convenient tool for defining the national community and its outsiders, in a wide variety of ways that move beyond a simple equivalency between outlaw and gay.
{"title":"‘The moment is poorly chosen’: Proust, Same-Sex Sexuality and Nationalism","authors":"Tyler Blakeney","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0384","url":null,"abstract":"This article attempts to think historically about the relationship between nationalism and same-sex sexuality in Proust's novel and in readers’ responses to the novel from the time of its publication to the present. The article uses a column written on the first part of Sodome et Gomorrhe by nationalist literary critic and author Binet-Valmer in 1921 in order to illuminate some of the sexual and political contexts of Proust's representation of same-sex sexuality. It then turns to two twenty-first-century uses of Proust by right-wing thinkers to theorize a particularly French, anti-communitarian, anti-politically correct form of homosexuality. Ultimately, these examples demonstrate that there is no one relationship between same-sex sexuality and nationalism or the national community; rather, same-sex sexuality often serves as a convenient tool for defining the national community and its outsiders, in a wide variety of ways that move beyond a simple equivalency between outlaw and gay.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46798426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay presents the Recherche's narrator as an expert in a world of experts. Considering previous scholarship on the sociological knowledge present in Proust's novel, I imagine the pursuit of this knowledge as characterizing its narrator, distinguishing him from the other specialists who populate the pages of his récit. Drawing on the work of Gil Eyal, I read this récit as displaying a marked attention to the ‘networks of expertise’ in which these other experts make their knowledge effective. The récit's language, meanwhile, provides information on the network of expertise in which the narrator himself must operate to assume the social position of expert. Ultimately, I argue that thinking about the narrator and his writing in terms of expertise allows us to ironize the narrator's knowledge about the social world. From this ironic distance, the Recherche becomes not a vehicle of such knowledge but an experience of it.
{"title":"‘An eye more penetrating than other men's’: Finding the Recherche's Narrator in a World of Experts","authors":"Ben Beitler","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0387","url":null,"abstract":"This essay presents the Recherche's narrator as an expert in a world of experts. Considering previous scholarship on the sociological knowledge present in Proust's novel, I imagine the pursuit of this knowledge as characterizing its narrator, distinguishing him from the other specialists who populate the pages of his récit. Drawing on the work of Gil Eyal, I read this récit as displaying a marked attention to the ‘networks of expertise’ in which these other experts make their knowledge effective. The récit's language, meanwhile, provides information on the network of expertise in which the narrator himself must operate to assume the social position of expert. Ultimately, I argue that thinking about the narrator and his writing in terms of expertise allows us to ironize the narrator's knowledge about the social world. From this ironic distance, the Recherche becomes not a vehicle of such knowledge but an experience of it.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47795846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Proust's Recherche includes detailed depictions of political mentalities that reveal the critical influence of socio-economic structures without foreclosing the possibility of individual autonomy. His novel also draws attention to a factor that seems resistant to formal social-scientific analysis, namely the role of emotional contingency in shaping individuals’ political views. The capriciousness displayed by Proust's characters in their approach to the Dreyfus Affair and other political controversies comes to epitomize a broader pattern of emotional volatility within high politics during the First World War and its aftermath. That caustic vision of how politics works remains pertinent in our own time, as the rebirth of charismatic authority and performative transgression transform politics into a contest of volatile polarizing enthusiasms.
{"title":"Proust's Political Emotions","authors":"Max McGuinness","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0386","url":null,"abstract":"Proust's Recherche includes detailed depictions of political mentalities that reveal the critical influence of socio-economic structures without foreclosing the possibility of individual autonomy. His novel also draws attention to a factor that seems resistant to formal social-scientific analysis, namely the role of emotional contingency in shaping individuals’ political views. The capriciousness displayed by Proust's characters in their approach to the Dreyfus Affair and other political controversies comes to epitomize a broader pattern of emotional volatility within high politics during the First World War and its aftermath. That caustic vision of how politics works remains pertinent in our own time, as the rebirth of charismatic authority and performative transgression transform politics into a contest of volatile polarizing enthusiasms.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45268911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article presents a catalogue of some of the ways in which Proust's novel fails to make sense. The major categories of non-sense examined here are: minor inconsistencies due to the unfinished quality of the work; chronological incoherences; and inconsistent distinctions between narrator and author, with particular attention to textual entailments of the differences between the author and his semi-autobiographical narrator in terms of homosexuality, Jewishness and snobbery.
{"title":"Proustian Nonsense: A Partial Taxonomy","authors":"Elisabeth Ladenson","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0383","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents a catalogue of some of the ways in which Proust's novel fails to make sense. The major categories of non-sense examined here are: minor inconsistencies due to the unfinished quality of the work; chronological incoherences; and inconsistent distinctions between narrator and author, with particular attention to textual entailments of the differences between the author and his semi-autobiographical narrator in terms of homosexuality, Jewishness and snobbery.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46534747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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