Progetto Proust (di Luchino Visconti)

Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2017

Whether solitary or shared, childhood reading in the Recherche is a sacred experience, somewhere between ethics and aesthetics and, on the other hand, between nature and culture. With both the Sandian narrators and the mother of the Proustian protagonist, reading aloud flirts with censorship, as far as it is subject to a tension between sensuality and repression. The grandmother’s “aesthetics of gift”—that opens up to the historical potential of language—offers an alternative beyond binaries. As the maternal reading of François le Champi shows it, censorship is a repressive practice that produces gaps and inconsistencies, but it also stimulates the openness of the imaginary and the triggering of creativity. The tale becomes a “potential space” (Winnicott), a “play” that facilitates transiting from childhood to adolescence. This “play” invites a new understanding of literature, no longer based on easy communicability but on the expressive potential of what is incommunicable. (In French)

H-France Reviews, 2021

Mauro Carbone’s interpretation of Proust is grounded in his interpretation of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. The aim of this paper is to call this interpretation into question by arguing that neither Deleuze nor Merleau-Ponty provides the basis for an interpretation of Proust that concentrates on the role of expression understood as ‘translation’ within his literary project. What is precluded is the possibility of an identification of expressionwith the process of writing. This is, however, exactly what an interpretation of Proustdemands.

This article explores the act of reading in Dante’s Divine Comedy and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. After giving an overview of the importance of the image of the book in both works, it offers a comparative reading of the episode of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno V and the episode of François le Champi in ‘Combray’. It uses Proust-scholar Adam Watt’s model of the ‘Primal Scene of reading’ to argue that both scenes crystallize their narrator-protagonists’ problematic relationship with their desire for literature. It finally considers how these relationships are resolved very differently in the works’ respective conclusions.

Scholars continue to debate the relationship between the author and the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu, but very few would argue against the temptation to conflate the two. This article examines the nature and implications of this enticement. As I argue here, the tendency to mistake the narrator for Proust, especially regarding his sexuality, can be attributed to the intersection of narrative, sexual, and readerly transgressions throughout la Recherche. I posit that Proust draws attention to his narrator's anonymous identity in passages that breach narrative and sexual conventions thereby tempting readers to participate in a transgressive reading of the text.

MLN, 2006

L'Esprit Createur, 2004

Review of essay collection, Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions, (U of Illinois Press, 2002).

H-Italy, 2020

excerpt: When speaking of science fiction in Italy, casual readers will naturally think of the magazine Urania, Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, and the series of the anthology Le meraviglie del possi-bile (1959)-all immediate and necessary references , of course. Still, there are other names without which the picture would necessarily be incomplete , people who have profoundly shaped the field while remaining at the margins of mainstream culture, nonetheless leaving their indelible trace in the way science fiction has been received-and is still perceived-in Italy. One of these is Riccardo Valla, whose indefatigable activity as a cultural mediator can now be reconstructed and appreciated thanks to this succinct, albeit dense monograph by Giulia Iannuzzi. After devoting two praiseworthy monographs to the macro-history of Italian science fiction (Fantascienza italiana: Riviste, autori, dibattiti dagli anni Cinquanta agli anni Settanta [2014] and Distopie, viaggi spaziali, allucinazioni: Fantascien-za italiana contemporanea [2015]), Iannuzzi now narrows her focus to the micro-history of a translator, publisher, and, more broadly, intellectual: two complementary and reciprocally enlightening operations, because the history of Valla's activity largely coincides with the parabola of science fiction in Italy. From this viewpoint, Iannuzzi's book is a veritable milestone: by collecting first-hand testimonies, reconstructing Valla's scattered bibliography, and providing the reader with an appendix of Valla's unpublished letters (edited by Luca G. Manenti), Iannuzzi offers us a most valid starting point for rethinking Valla's work and, more broadly, the cultural context in which he operated. ...

2013

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-03119356 Reflections and studies on Proust’s early critical reception are (almost) as old as the reception itself: as early as the mid-twenties, critical overviews were published on Proust’s success in France. Another specificity has to do with the posthumous publication of most volumes, for the debate surrounding A la recherche du temps perdu took place while the last three parts of the Recherche were being published: La Prisonnière (1923), Albertine disparue (1925), Le Temps retrouvé (1927), as well as the Chroniques volume (collected articles, also published in 1927), collections of letters and the Correspondance générale (1930-1936). This concomitance explains both the interest and the limits of many articles and books which have followed Proust’s death. Moreover, the post-war publication of Jean Santeuil (1952) and Contre Sainte-Beuve (1954), decisively changed the perception of the birth of his work, and shed a new light on early analyses. It is often said that, whereas A la recherche is now considered as the masterpiece of modern French literature, Proust was not acknowledged before the sixties; but a look at the early reception shows how simplistic this conception is. A la recherche was a commercial success in 1919, when Proust received the Goncourt Prize for A l’ombre des Jeunes Filles, and critics were unanimous in paying homage to him when he died, in November 1922. Nevertheless, his fortune dipped somewhat in France, in the twenties and thirties, while Proust was slowly discovered in other countries; after the war, his work came again to the fore, and was widely translated. Proust’s early reception might therefore be symbolized by a spiral, combining moments of favour and periods of oblivion or negative critique.