The Rhetoric of Proust’s Early Aesthetic Manifestos

Marcel Proust’s non-ёction heritage includes several texts that are usually seen as the future novelist’s attempts to formulate his views on the nature of art and to clarify his place in the literary life of the time. This article examines Proust’s most accomplished anti-symbolist manifesto, “Contre l’Obscuritй”, and three fragments describing different aspects of the creative experience. The purpose of this research is to investigate the rhetorical aspects of Proust’s reяection on the creative process and to establish the pragmatics of this sort of writing in the context of the novelist’s formation. While tracing the rhetoric strategies Proust uses to distance himself from the artistic trends of his own generation, the article proposes to read these early drafts not only as a theory of art but also as a manifestation of the author’s doubts and ambitions regarding his literary project. As proved in this article, Proust in his debuts is most original and most modernist not when he is trying to imitate art theorists or critics but when he is touching upon the struggles of a young author (fear to lose inspiration or to be unable to ёnish the major work, problems of ёnding literary identity, relationship with the readers).

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