Mirroring the Queer: Rewritings of the Albertine Episode

Description du projet

Un regard plus approfondi sur le personnage allosexuel de Proust

Le personnage d’Albertine dans le roman de Marcel Proust, «À la recherche du temps perdu», a été une source d’inspiration pour de nombreuses œuvres différentes au cours des 20 dernières années. Le projet QUART, financé par l’UE, étudiera cet ensemble d’œuvres afin de lever le voile sur la manière dont le personnage transtextuel d’Albertine apparaît dans d’autres mondes fictifs. QUART avance que ce personnage changeant et fugace de Proust a été choisi par les artistes et les écrivains des mondes francophones et anglophones, car sa pluralité insaisissable reflète le potentiel d’une figure allosexuelle de désobéissance. Il s’intéressera à la manière dont Albertine suscite des compréhensions renouvelées et renouvelables de l’allosexualité. Les conclusions mettront Albertine sous les feux de la rampe en tant que figure allosexuelle qui transforme le traumatisme de l’exclusion en un domaine alternatif viable.

Objectif

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.