Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations

This book confronts the singularity of the relationship between two exemplary writers of the last century in order to challenge and to reinvigorate our notions of what art and criticism literary or otherwise can do. While it takes Roland Barthess encounters with Marcel Prousts monumental masterpiece la recherche du temps perdu as its specific focus, the implications of its argument are far-reaching. Indeed, the book argues that Barthess writing on Prousts work between the early 1950s and 1980 (including a substantial set of unpublished notes for a series of seminars delivered at the University of Rabat in 19691970) proposes not only a critical culture of Proust that is productively inconsistent, but also, more generally, a fresh understanding of criticism as a creative activity that embraces insecurity and variation as it refuses to remain fixed upon reassuringly stable themes, meanings and interpretations.