Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern or Why Style Matters

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.

ContentsIntroduction1. Proust in SchoolFrench Education and PasticheProust the Schoolboy, or, Pastiche RevisitedThe "Pedagogical Scene" in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleursAn Apple for Andrée: Pedagogy and Education Reform in Proust's Recherche2. Parody and Pastiche in Nineteenth-Century French LiteratureParody vs. PasticheA few examples of nineteenth-century pastiche3. Why Proust's pastiches are neither parodic, nor a proof of masteryover the predecessorProust'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 PostmodernProust Postmodern?What is Postmodernism? A Theoretical Introduction.Postmodern PasticheFrom the "first style" to the "neo"Glimmerings of Postmodern Nostalgia: The Goncourt PasticheThe End of Influence, the Beginning of Postmodernity7. Literary Pastiche Since ProustProustian Pastiche after ProustMartin-Chauffier, Maurois, and Modiano, or "Pasticheur pastiché"OuLiPo: Potential LiteratureRight-Wing Pastiche (Vichy and the Collaborationists)Pastiche: Literary Genre, or Mere Moment?8. Pastiche Proustian, Postmodern, and Purloined in the Cinema, orWhere'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 pastiche9. Postmodern Pastiche in the Films of Rohmer and GansRohmer's L'anglaise et le duc: The Eighteenth Centuryas You Have Always/Never Seen ItHutcheon and Jameson on pastiche: the critical potentialof postmodernismCritical malgré soi: Le pacte des loupsConclusionBibliographyIndexAbout the Author