Course Description |
Two anniversaries give rise to this confrontation. We commemorated the centennial of the death of Proust (1871-1922) in 2022, and celebrate the 150 th birthday of Colette (1873- 1954) in 2023. They belong to an exceptional generation born around 1870, the “Modern French Classics,” with Valéry, Gide, Claudel and Péguy. They met in fashionable salons in the 1890’s, when Colette, just married to Willy, arrived in Paris, and they did not much like each other: he was a snob, she was outrageous. But Colette read Du côté de chez Swann as soon it came out in 1913, and was strongly impressed by the evocation of the village of Combray. Proust congratulated Colette warmly after reading Mitsou in 1919, a brief romance between a dancer and a lieutenant during WWI. During the last years of Proust’s life, Proust and Colette were the two most visible and popular authors on the postwar literary scene. Among the “Six of 1870,” common to Proust and Colette is the focus on sensations, memory and time, as well as a curiosity for sexual transgressions. “Combray” and La Maison de Claudine explore the lost paradise of childhood; Le Pur et l’Impur is a response to Sodome et Gomorrhe; Le Temps retrouvé and La Naissance du jour the autofiction as a genre. We will read the two authors as serendipitous counterparts.
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