Synopsis "Postmodern Proust"
Postmodern Proust? Few writers are so routinely cited as high modernist, particularly by theorists of postmodernism, who thus consign A la recherche du temps perdu to the canons of the past. Although some critics have cautiously begun to notice Proust's surreptitiously postmodern audacity, Margaret E. Gray's study is the first sustained attempt to bring postmodern perspectives fully to bear on the Proustian text. This is accomplished by using the "postmodern" as a diversified critical toolkit to solicit Proust's daring narrative practice and by stressing a commitment to cultural contextualization.Bringing together rhetorical, psychoanalytic, feminist, and interdisciplinary approaches, Gray explores Proust's "postmodern" treatment of the conventions of genre, narrator, narration, representation, closure, and reception. After examining Proust's scrambling of generic boundaries, Gray goes on to investigate his text's use of an evacuated subjectivity; its unfolding as a forgetful and inventive narrating act; its formulation of the "feminine" and figuration as strategies to subvert representation; and its depiction of closure as a critical delusion. A concluding chapter scrutinizes contemporary conditions of reception in an effort to account for the cultural myth that now informs any reading of Proust.Proust himself supplied his postmodern critics with much of the rhetoric that has been used to call his "triumphalist," "masterly" narrative into question. By shifting the emphasis from the book as an architectural, completed achievement, to the reader, engaged in an endless, uncertain process of reinterpretation, Gray allows us to see a new, unsettling, profoundly skeptical - postmodern - Proust.
