Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern or Why Style Matters

James F. Austin

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern, or Why Style Matters argues against the traditional view that Marcel Proust wrote pastiches, that is, texts that imitate the style of another author, to master his literary predecessors while sharpening his writerly quill. On the contrary, James F. Austin demonstrates that Proust’s oeuvre, and In Search of Lost Time in particular, deploy pastiche to other ends: Proust’s pastiches, in fact, “do things with words” to create powerful real-world effects. His works are indeed performative acts that forge social relationships, redefine our ideas of literature, and even work against oppressive political and economic discourses.

Building on the “speech-act” theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller, and on the postmodern theory of Fredric Jameson, this book not only elucidates the performative nature of pastiche, but also shows that the famous “Goncourt” pastiche from In Search of Lost Time has attracted so much attention because it already attained the postmodern; that is, it eliminated temporal depth and experience, transforming time itself into a nostalgic style of an era, and into the sort of aestheticized surface that came to define postmodernism decades later.

To reflect this transformation of pastiche, this work rearticulates its history in France around Proust. Reconfiguring a scholastic, classically-inspired pedagogical tradition based on imitation, and breaking with the dominant satirical practice, Proust’s work opened up possibilities in the twentieth century for a new kind of pastiche: playful and performative in the literary field, and postmodern in a French cinema that, as with the Goncourt pastiche, represents time as the visual style of an era, whether unreflexively in “heritage” films such as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, or discerningly in Eric Rohmer’s Lady and the Duke, which uses period pictorial and painterly conventions to illustrate how the representation of history onscreen typically flattens time into style.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 250 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61148-410-6 • Hardback • August 2013 • $113.00 • (£87.00)

978-1-61148-692-6 • Paperback • April 2015 • $57.99 • (£45.00)

978-1-61148-411-3 • eBook • August 2013 • $55.00 • (£42.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Books & Reading, Literary Criticism / General, Literary Criticism / European / French

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern or Why Style Matters

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Summary

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern, or Why Style Matters argues against the traditional view that Marcel Proust wrote pastiches, that is, texts that imitate the style of another author, to master his literary predecessors while sharpening his writerly quill. On the contrary, James F. Austin demonstrates that Proust’s oeuvre, and In Search of Lost Time in particular, deploy pastiche to other ends: Proust’s pastiches, in fact, “do things with words” to create powerful real-world effects. His works are indeed performative acts that forge social relationships, redefine our ideas of literature, and even work against oppressive political and economic discourses.

Building on the “speech-act” theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller, and on the postmodern theory of Fredric Jameson, this book not only elucidates the performative nature of pastiche, but also shows that the famous “Goncourt” pastiche from In Search of Lost Time has attracted so much attention because it already attained the postmodern; that is, it eliminated temporal depth and experience, transforming time itself into a nostalgic style of an era, and into the sort of aestheticized surface that came to define postmodernism decades later.

To reflect this transformation of pastiche, this work rearticulates its history in France around Proust. Reconfiguring a scholastic, classically-inspired pedagogical tradition based on imitation, and breaking with the dominant satirical practice, Proust’s work opened up possibilities in the twentieth century for a new kind of pastiche: playful and performative in the literary field, and postmodern in a French cinema that, as with the Goncourt pastiche, represents time as the visual style of an era, whether unreflexively in “heritage” films such as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, or discerningly in Eric Rohmer’s Lady and the Duke, which uses period pictorial and painterly conventions to illustrate how the representation of history onscreen typically flattens time into style.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 250 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61148-410-6 • Hardback • August 2013 • $113.00 • (£87.00)

978-1-61148-692-6 • Paperback • April 2015 • $57.99 • (£45.00)

978-1-61148-411-3 • eBook • August 2013 • $55.00 • (£42.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Books & Reading, Literary Criticism / General, Literary Criticism / European / French

Author

James F. Austin is associate professor of French at Connecticut College.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction
1. Proust in School
French Education and Pastiche
Proust the Schoolboy, or, Pastiche Revisited
The “Pedagogical Scene” in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
An Apple for Andrée: Pedagogy and Education Reform in Proust’s Recherche
2. Parody and Pastiche in Nineteenth-Century French Literature
Parody vs. Pastiche A few examples of nineteenth-century pastiche 3. Why Proust’s pastiches are neither parodic, nor a proof of mastery
over the predecessor
Proust’s PastichesThe “Affaire Lemoine” PastichesWhy Proust Wrote Pastiche (Critical Views of the Last Four Decades)Self-pastiche4. What can pastiche do?
Pastiche as PerformanceRetroactive literatureFlaubert, à la ProustJe me suis toujours fait une certaine idée de Balzac...
How to Make Friends With Words (Literature as Socially Performative)
On the “Seriousness” of Pastiche5. Pastiche as Politically and Economically Performative in the RecherchePerformative styles and imperative politics: Proust’s “optatif”
Buy!
Proust: Copiest, Pasticheur, or Pierre Menard? A genetic examination of the manuscript.
The politics of media and advertising6. Proust’s Goncourt Pastiche and the Postmodern
Proust Postmodern?
What is Postmodernism? A Theoretical Introduction.
Postmodern Pastiche
From the “first style” to the “neo”Glimmerings of Postmodern Nostalgia: The Goncourt PasticheThe End of Influence, the Beginning of Postmodernity

7. Literary Pastiche Since Proust
Proustian Pastiche after Proust
Martin-Chauffier, Maurois, and Modiano, or “Pasticheur pastiché”
OuLiPo: Potential Literature
Right-Wing Pastiche (Vichy and the Collaborationists)Pastiche: Literary Genre, or Mere Moment?
8. Pastiche Proustian, Postmodern, and Purloined in the Cinema, or,
Where’s the pastiche in French Film?
Jameson’s mode rétro: Filming “the imaginary style of a real past”
Ruiz’s Le temps retrouvéStan Douglas’s “Overture”: An adaptation counterexample to heritage pastiche
9. Postmodern Pastiche in the Films of Rohmer and Gans
Rohmer’s L’anglaise et le duc: The Eighteenth Century
as You Have Always/Never Seen It Hutcheon and Jameson on pastiche: the critical potential
of postmodernism
Critical malgré soi: Le pacte des loups
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Reviews

Austin's repeated claim to work under the banner of his poststructuralist mentors should not discourage readers. Austin (Connecticut College) writes well and clearly about his subject. He has carefully read the relevant Proust criticism, basing his analyses appropriately on Jean Milly, though he is regrettably negligent in regard to larger theory on related, intertextual devices like allusion. Contrary to Austin's claim, he has not revised the history of pastiche. The device has long been performative and parodic. Still, his fine analysis of Proust's treatment offers an original view through the lens of pastiche. Although this side of Proust is most often associated with Pastiches et mélanges, it is also and perhaps especially a major element in À la recherche du temps perdu, where it allowed him to engage Homer, the Goncourts, and, more interestingly, his own characters and, indeed, himself. Proust was a stylistic master, able to integrate his pastiches seamlessly into his masterpiece. Austin also considers pastiche in subsequent writers like Maurois, Martin-Chauffier, Modiano, and Perec in some detail. He finally considers pastiche in major directors like Godard, Rohmer, and Agnès Varda. Summing Up: Recommended. Researchers, faculty.
— Choice Reviews

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern or Why Style Matters

James F. Austin

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern or Why Style Matters

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