Ossa-Richardson, A;
(2022)
Proust, Typical Novelist: Literary Context as Type.
Modern Language Quarterly
, 83
(1)
pp. 27-55.
10.1215/00267929-9475017.
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Abstract
A decade ago Rita Felski argued that reliance on context shuts down a text's meaning by enclosing it in a restrictive historical “box” and alienating its individuality. This essay offers a rebuttal to Felski's critique, first by delineating the genealogy of her concerns in literary, philosophical, and architectural thought of the late nineteenth century, and second by exploring an alternative model of context as type, as revealed by a close reading of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust's novel repeatedly makes use of a notion of the type (a person, an artwork, a battle) that prioritizes the act of typifying, an act that does not sacrifice but discloses, or even constitutes, the individual. Like the Proustian type, context is best understood not as an alienation from, but as a route to, the particularity of the literary object.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Proust, Typical Novelist: Literary Context as Type |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1215/00267929-9475017 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9475017 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Typology, Rita Felski, modernism, architecture, Wilhelm Windelband |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10147998 |
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