Mirroring the Queer: Rewritings of the Albertine Episode

Descripción del proyecto

Un estudio detallado del personaje «queer» de Proust

El personaje de Albertine, de la novela de Marcel Proust «En busca del tiempo perdido», ha inspirado muchas obras diferentes en los últimos veinte años. El proyecto QUART, financiado con fondos europeos, estudiará este conjunto de obras para arrojar luz sobre cómo aparece el personaje transtextual de Albertine en mundos de ficción alternativos. QUART propone que el personaje proustiano, cambiante y fugaz, ha sido elegido por artistas y escritores del mundo francófono y anglófono porque su inescrutable pluralidad encierra el potencial de un personaje «queer» de rebeldía. Estudiará cómo Albertine inicia una comprensión renovada y renovable de lo que significa ser «queer». Los resultados arrojarán luz sobre Albertine como personaje «queer» que transforma el trauma de la exclusión en un mundo alternativo viable.

Objetivo

The last twenty years have seen the emergence of many different works inspired by the character Albertine from Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu. The Proustian figure evokes a surprising intertextuality across different genres, art forms and media including a poetry pamphlet and a verse novel by Anne Carson, a play by Colin Duckworth, a musical by Richard Nelson and Ricky Ian Gordon, a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, films by Chantal Akerman and Véronique Aubouy and novels by Jacqueline Rose, Angela Carter and Hélène Cixous. This cluster of works has not been previously studied. More interestingly, it offers a case of a cross-textual character appearing in alternative fictional worlds. At the same time, it fills the gaps of the strategic Proustian underrepresentation of Albertine in two ways: it either adapts the story in different genres and media or imagines a different destiny, ontology, pre/post history of the character. Examining Albertine’s metamorphoses into other fictional characters, narratives, and sociohistorical contexts, this project aims to trace the trajectory of this exemplary character thus making an important addition to the narratological and interdisciplinary study of character. At the same time, QUART puts forward the hypothesis that the Proustian changeable and fleeting figure has been chosen by artists and writers of the Francophone and Anglophone worlds because her ungraspable plurality encapsulates the potential of a queer figure of defiance. It therefore aims at conceptualizing her as a form of resistance at the intersection of sex, gender, race and class based on the hypothesis that Albertine as a queer figure assumes the ethical act of taking the risk of one’s desire. She transforms the trauma of exclusion into a viable alternative realm, where values are distributed otherwise than according to the hegemonic order. The project therefore examines how Albertine initiates renewed and renewable understandings of queerness.