Architects of Modernism: The Case of Proust
Professor Patrick O’Donovan (University College Cork)
When: Wednesday, 9th November 2022, 5:15 pm
Where: Project Room (1.06), 50 George Square
*Open to all, no need to register, but registration via Eventbrite appreciated to consider catering numbers.
Architecture is a model for modernist fiction, notably so in the work of Marcel Proust and of Virginia Woolf. Architecture is first of all a prototype for each writer’s work: architectural models are invoked as sources of far-reaching literary experiments. But architecture also forms a good deal of the substance of each writer’s work: each is concerned with the writer’s own space and what it represents, and then in turn with the forces that shaped the environments in which they wrote and on which they drew in elaborating their fictional worlds, spaces that testify to rapid urban growth, the rise of the railways and of tourism, innovative and sometimes disruptive forms of modern urban design, increased social stratification, elite sociability, the character of the city as a work of art. These strands will form the focus of the paper, in which, by way of a modest centenary tribute, I will also address some transformations of longer-term traditions in the relation between architecture and literature at Proust’s hands.
Patrick O’Donovan is Professor of French in University College Cork. He studied in Ireland, France and the UK, where he worked for a number of years, up the coast in Dundee and latterly in Cambridge. He is a former editor of the journal French Studies. He has published widely on literature and ideas since 1789, latterly on the poetry of Vigny, on the tradition of the personal novel in France, and on Certeau. His paper today draws on a current project dedicated to Proust’s ‘house of fiction’, on which he has also recently published.
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