Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern or Why Style Matters

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern or Why Style Matters argues against the traditional critical view that minimizes Proust's practice of pastiche - the imitation of a writer's style -and that considers it a simple exercise of mastering the predecessor. Instead, this work establishes pastiche as a powerful, ubiquitous practice central to Proust's entire oeuvre. It redefines, moreover, the history of pastiche by showing that Proust separated pastiche from parody (an attitude of ridicule toward a text). It also shows that Proust practiced pastiche as a performative speech act with real-world effects: "doing things with words," he forged social relationships, redefined our ideas of literature, and worked against oppressive political discourse. Furthermore, this book both analyzes literary pastiche since Proust, including its place within OuLiPo, and "postmodern pastiche," including within French heritage cinema, where the imitation of style represents time and history. Finally, it concludes that Proustian pastiche enabled the emergeance of the very concept of postmodernism.