1. Building on work by Antoine Compagnon, Marion Schmid, and Thanh-Vân, Anderson will argue that Proust adopts the position of the aesthete in his depictions of female sexuality in order to speak directly about lesbianism while evading censorship. As Elisabeth Ladenson has shown, this differs substantially from his method of depicting male homosexuality: while Proust's writing on affairs between men relies greatly on the pseudo-biological language of sexology, his representations of lesbianism are among his most poetic passages. It is through this aestheticization, Anderson argues, that Proust is able to present a richer depiction of lesbianism, by expressing a fin-de-siècle curiosity about transgressive sexuality from the vantage point of a disinterested observer of modern life, à la Baudelaire. Anderson will also consider how Proust portrays characters such as Albertine and Andrée as adopting a genre, or style, in the fashion of female dandyism, thus exploring how Proust is influenced by fin-de-siècle models of self-fashioning and irony while also moving beyond them. In this sense, Anderson argues that late-nineteenth century writing on aesthetics and sexuality created the literary imaginary that made Proust’s writing on transgression possible, while exploring how he tested the limitations created by these new literary conventions.
2. Can the beauty of art be an end in itself while also serving a psychological function? Rodriquez will argue that Proust’s narrator sustains this paradox within the temporal convolutions that define his experience of grief. Rodriquez will suggest moreover that grief queers the narrator’s aesthetic sensibilities, as sites of beauty become sites of refused heternormative futurity. While critics such as Ricciardi and Bersani have analyzed how Proust's representation of mourning relates to modernist theories of memory, materiality, and sensual experience, Rodriquez argues that the narrator’s work of mourning relates rather to a question of fin de siècle aesthetics, and of the Aesthetic Movement in particular, concerning the nature of beauty and its functions. Proust synthesizes the aestheticist idea that beauty is a sufficient cause for a work of art with the Ruskinian ideal that art should serve a moral function. This synthesis is operated and signified by layered acts of aesthetic contemplation in which the Ruskinian model is queered by the integration of ghostly maternal figures. A doubling of perception—temporally through narrative prolepsis, intersubjectively through apostrophe—allows the narrator to hold onto the memory of art encountered and appreciated “for art’s sake” as a precondition for coming to terms with loss. Yet this mourning takes the form of interminable lingering in the contemplation of beauty where the narrator continues to see with and through his dead mother and grandmother. To be moved by beauty and to be moved by grief become indistinguishable in the tears that fill the narrator’s eyes.
3. Kaye’s paper explores Proust’s engagement with Gustave Moreau, one of only five painters discussed at length in the Recherche. Proust’s interest, Kaye argues, arises from two entwined interests: an aestheticist disavowal of realism as aesthetically impoverished, and an absorption in androgyny. In his essay on Moreau, Proust saluted “all those beardless men with feminine faces” in Moreau’s paintings,” a gender-dissolving androgyny that for Proust is paradoxically both artificial and consecrated by nature. Above all, Proust admired the mimesis-eschewing colors employed in Moreau’s canvases because they resembled nothing in nature—an effect Proust characterized as the “coloring of a world where each separate color is, not the color it is in the world of ours, but the color it is in that canvas.” At the same time, the painter’s work resonates with unfathomable mystery and transgression, as when Swann conjures up “an iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities embroidered, as in some fantasy of Gustave Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers interwoven with precious jewels,” at once an image of erotic transgression and of malevolent nature invaded by artifice. Kaye's paper explores the array of fin-de-siècle Aestheticist and Decadent associations that Moreau inspired in Proust.
As organizer, I will insist on papers being written in advance and held to strict length, so as to ensure at least 15 minutes for discussion.