Abstract EN:

Critics often consider the presence of newly invented technologies in À la recherche du temps perdu as a "modernist" or "futurist" aspect of a novel reputed to be backward-looking without fully taking into account Proust’s criticism of progressive notions applied to art. By combining intertextual close reading and cultural history, this dissertation explores the complexity of Proustian representations of modernity, focussing on four machines : the telephone, the bicycle, the automobile, and the plane. It includes a comprehensive survey of Proust’s corpus (correspondance, earliest works, pastiches, critical writings, novel, and edited manuscripts), as well as an archeological investigation of literary and cultural representations (contemporary novels, poems, journalistic or polemical texts such as questionnaires, columns, manifestoes, and iconographic documents such as postcards or posters). This contextual analysis allows us to better examine the historical singularity of Proust's aesthetic, ideological, and strategic use of these vehicules. This dissertation not only shows the symbolic, narrative, poetic, and theoretical interest of these motifs within the story of an artistic vocation and the conception of life and the work of art as a network, but also emphasizes the social and dialogical dimension of Proust's style which, irreducible to an immediate transcription of personnal experience, uses and undoes the ommonplaces of his time to create an allusive and ambiguous representation of modern experience and discourse. Proust's representations of modernity are ambivalent : ludic, dramatic, ironic and critical, often associated with the theme of sexual ambiguity.