Modern Languages and Cultures

This article proposes a more inclusive consideration of manifestations of artistic activity in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu through the example of Odette Swann’s act of self-fashioning in the conclusion of ‘Autour de Mme Swann’. The article opens with an overview of the relationship between women and the arts in la Recherche: Proust’s female characters, apart from actresses, do not express themselves through the canonical arts. But Proust also depicts creative activities of a more domestic nature, which are not usually considered art forms. This article posits that la Recherche destabilizes hierarchical categorizations of what should be considered superior or inferior forms of creative expression. As a result, the passages concerned with Odette’s toilettes should be considered as integral parts of the novel’s exploration of the nature of art. Odette’s transformation from the Botticellian ‘pièce de musée’ desired by her husband into a new artefact of her own design is considered in dialogue with Charles Baudelaire’s essay ‘Le peintre de la vie moderne’. Proust’s Odette can be viewed as a response both to Baudelaire’s suggestion that female adornment is an aesthetic endeavour and to the complex twofold temporality which Baudelaire finds behind both beauty and great art.

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.

This paper offers new insights into Charles Baudelaire’s ambivalent relationship with tradition through the example of the sonnet. Almost half of the poems in Les Fleurs du Mal are sonnets, a form which originated in thirteenth-century Italian vernacular poetry and whose predilected topic was love, as experienced by a male poetic subject for an angelic female figure. I conduct a comparative reading of three sonnets in which a male subject describes a woman walking through a city: Guido Cavalcanti’s ‘Chi è questa che ven’, Dante Alighieri’s ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta’, and Baudelaire’s ‘À une passante’. This allows me to bring to light the continuities and divergences in these sonnets’ treatments of temporality and desire. I then explore why the sonnet as a prescribed form might be well-suited to give expression to these themes. Finally, I consider how the sonnet, a form which is made transient by its concision, eternal by its uninterrupted presence in poetry, and manifold by the different character it takes under each pen, can be related to Baudelaire’s conception of ‘le moderne’.