Charlotte Vrielink

Since the publication of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), multiple artists taken up the challenge of visualizing his modernist magnum opus. In this article, I will discuss the interpretation of Dutch artist Kees van Dongen, who created 77 illustrations for a luxury edition published by Gallimard in 1947. By looking at the way Van Dongen visualized different forms of art, I will argue that Van Dongen's interpretation is more artistically interesting than has been asserted before, as there are many intertextual and even intermedial references and practices to be found in Van Dongen's aquarelles.

Review (in Dutch) by Paul van de Capelleveen, curator at the National Library of the Netherlands:
http://pvc-kb.blogspot.fr/2017/07/159-symposium-tekst-beeld-franse.html

Information on the symposium:
https://www.kb.nl/nieuws/2017/symposium-tekst-beeld-franse-kunstenaarsboeken

Ecopoetics is a relatively new research discipline that studies the relations between literature and nature. However, unlike ecocriticism, it does not focus on ethical of political analyses of nature writings, but it sheds light on the more creative aspect of the writing of literature, such as vocabulary, style and text structure. This ecopoetic approach seems to be especially suited for French literature, for French nature writings do not often raise environmental awareness and are not set in extreme natural areas of “wilderness”, like some of their Anglo-American counterparts, and therefore require another perspective (Posthumus 2011). In this paper, I would like to apply the ecopoetic approach to one of the most illustrious novels of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913). This work has been studied in various ways, but never before in combination with an ecocritical or ecopoetic framework. I will show which ecopoetic perspectives, as formulated by Pierre Schoentjes in his work Ce qui a lieu (2015), can be retraced in Swann’s Way and therefore will use the concept of the rhizome by Deleuze and Guattari (especially the notion of “cartography”) and the idea of “weaving” by Jean-Pierre Richard to analyse the structural organisation of Swann’s way, which are constructed according to the same principles: non-linearity, non-hierarchy and interconnectedness. At sentence level, I will demonstrate how style and syntax evoke the various characteristics of the natural world in order to create a mimicry of nature, such as the idea of lilacs and the passing of time, the femmes-fleurs and the aquatic reflections which illustrate the narrator’s associative thoughts. All these subtle ways in which nature shapes the novel show that Marcel Proust is much more of an “eco-poet” than he may have seemed before.

More information on the colloquium: https://breakingnewgroundumd.weebly.com/

Creation and guidance of literary city walk "Women writers in The Hague in the long 19th century", October 28, 2015, The Hague, for the Museum of Literature (Literatuurmuseum), The Hague.
On the occasion of the exposition "Omdat ik iets te zeggen had: Nederlandse schrijfsters uit de 19e eeuw", organised by HERA Travelling TexTs and Huygens ING, Museum of Literature, Sept-Oct 2015.

More information on and summary of the literary walk on request.