Chapter 27 - Late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century responses

Summary

At Proust's death, the sight of the notebooks containing À la recherche, standing together near their author's bed, reminded Jean Cocteau of the watches whose ticking continues on the wrists of soldiers slain on the battlefield. Ninety years after Proust's passing, the metronomic ticking continues through the pages he wrote and through the stream of works he still inspires. Books on Proust and the Recherche number in their thousands and the flow shows little sign of abating; crucially, though, as this chapter will show, as well as quantity, there is quality. Proust has a broad international readership inside and beyond the academy. In universities, his work is taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level, in parts or as a whole, in relation to cinema and the arts; and within modern languages, comparative literature and gender studies courses. Monographs, comparative critical studies, articles, translations and adaptations continue to appear and critics and practitioners from many disciplines are still drawn to the work, its themes and characters, its Narrator's ideas, the challenges and rewards of its rich and demanding textures. This chapter will consider the primary developments in the most recent phase of Proust criticism, from the publication of the second Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of the Recherche in 1987–9 to the present day.