" Du côté de chez Swann " or the cosmopolitanism of a French novel

Colloquium organized by Antoine Compagnon and Nathalie Mauriac Dyer with support from LabEx TransferS and CNRS ("République des Lettres" and ITEM). Combray, its church and its fields, the "Guermantes side" and its aristocrats, can pass for models of "francité" and of being rooted in a national tradition. Yet early critics denounced the "strangeness" of a book that did not, in their view, fit into the tradition of the French novel. Profoundly nourished by English and Russian literature, familiar with German philosophy and music, enamored of Italian and Flemish painting, sensitive to Japonism and the Ballets Russes, Proust's cosmopolitan culture is also that of a certain Belle Époque before the disaster. The aim is to explore the transnational aesthetics of a great European novel.