excerpted from tempsperdu.com
"The Sexual Question in Proust" by Griet Deca
An intelligent and thorough essay on the theme of homosexuality in the novel. Also available in the orginalFrench.
" Montaigne and Proust: Architects of Memory" by Cynthia Israel
"Proust wrote under the façade of an amateur writer, like Montaigne, and the importance of travel and of illness to the generation and content of both oeuvres bears witness to Montaigne’s presence in the Recherche despite his apparent absence (15–17). By thinking of the Recherche in its cathedral form at least one other dimension of the literary kinship between Montaigne and Proust becomes clear. The mnemonic architecture which underlies both the Essais and the Recherche is the stamp of their modernity as well as their debt to the Middle Ages."
"Proust's Ruined Mirror" by Jonathan Wallace
The Ethcial Spectacle (Vol 5, No. 2 February 1999). "Proust says that the novel is a mirror held up to life. The virtue of the work is in the quality of the mirror, not of the life it reflects. He was certainly right, but one wonders if he was aware in saying it of the deep flaws in his own work. Whether or not he was, his huge talent resulted in a 4,000 page novel which states, and simultaneously illustrates by its own structure, that humans are incapable of fashioning a perfect mirror."
" Art and Literature in Proust and Céline" by Pascal A. Ifri
Romance Languages Annual (1995). "Focusing on the creative process in Proust and Céline, we intend to show in this presentation that they share also many ideas about Art, particularly in their conception of painting and music."
" Coming Full Circle: the Use of Digression in Diderot's Jacques le fatalist and Proust's "Combray" by F. Miyamasu
"The digressive device figures prominently in Diderot's Jacques le fataliste and Proust’s "Combray." Although belonging to different literary periods, comparative analysis reveals similarities in both the form the digressive device takes in either work and the purpose it serves therein."
"Marcel Proust" by A.V. Lunacharsky
An early piece of Marxist criticism of the novel, published in 1934.
"Why Proust? And Why Now?" by Dinitia Smith
New York Times (April 13, 2000). Another article about Proust's popularity that also discusses Carter's and Tadié's biographies.
" Making up for lost time" by Andrew Marr
The Observer (January 16, 2000). The author revisits Illiers-Combray to both celebrate and understand Proust's comeback.
