Mirroring the Queer: Rewritings of the Albertine Episode

Descrizione del progetto

Uno sguardo più da vicino al personaggio queer di Proust

Il personaggio di Albertine del romanzo di Marcel Proust «À la recherche du temps perdu» è stata fonte di ispirazione di diverse opere negli ultimi 20 anni. Il progetto QUART, finanziato dall’UE, studierà questo gruppo di opere per chiarire il modo in cui il carattere intertestuale di Albertine appare in mondi narrativi alternativi. QUART propone l’idea che la figura mutevole e fugace proustiana sia stata scelta da artisti e scrittori del mondo francofono e anglofono perché la sua pluralità inafferrabile racchiude il potenziale di una figura queer che assume un atteggiamento di sfida. Si studierà come Albertine dà il via a una comprensione rinnovata e rinnovabile della queerness. I risultati faranno luce su Albertine quale figura queer che trasforma il trauma dell’esclusione in un possibile regno alternativo.

Obiettivo

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.