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 Regis 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.
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