Paris and Proust’s Recherche
Architecture is a model for modernist fiction, notably so in the work of Marcel Proust. Architecture is first of all a creative prototype: architectural models are invoked as sources of far-reaching literary experiments. But architecture also forms a good deal of the substance of Proust’s vast novel, which is shaped by the writer’s own notoriously idiosyncratic use of space, and then in turn by the environments in which he lived and wrote, in particular that of the Second Empire, and on which he drew in elaborating his fictional world, one that testifies to rapid urban growth, the rise of the railways and of tourism, innovative and sometimes disruptive forms of modern urban design, increased social stratification, elite sociability, the equivocal standing of the city as a work of art. These strands will form the focus of the paper, which, by way of a modest centenary tribute, will also address some transformations of longer-term traditions in the relation between architecture and literature at the
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