This course will focus in depth on the first volume of the novel which perhaps more than any other work dominated French literature in the twentieth century, Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, before studying texts by a number of other important writers who wrote in Proust’s wake. Domination inevitably implies a power struggle; at the heart of the questions the course will explore is the relationship between literature and power. By means of close textual analysis, we will examine how the prescribed texts all thematize domination in some form, notably with regard to social and sexual relations. Sometimes they universalize it, suggesting that intersubjective relations are necessarily hierarchical; sometimes they explore the possibility of subverting it, beckoning towards a mode of relation that need not involve the submission of one element to another, positing the existence of a non-subordinating dominance, a dominance that does not dominate. The texts also raise questions of intertextual domination: what makes for a specifically literary power? is beauty a form of power? does a very powerful text overshadow others, or on the contrary call them into being in response to its appeal? Finally, the seminars will discuss the power relationship between reader and text: is a powerful text precisely one that can never be mastered? And, if reading is not an exercise in domination, what is it?
Prescribed texts:
Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Folio)
Marguerite Duras, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (Folio)
Marguerite Duras, Détruire, dit-elle (Minuit)
Jean Genet, Journal du voleur (Folio)
Samuel Beckett, Nouvelles et textes pour rien (Minuit)
