Medialisierung der Wahrnehmung und Konstruktion innerer Puppen im Werk von Marcel Proust

Abstract

Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past can be read as a palimpsest of pictorial imaginations that is at the core of the novel’s blurring of such binary distinctions as between ‘real’ and ‘ fictitious’ or ‘male’ and ‘female’. Inverting and distorting the original contexts of meaning of paintings can thus be defined as a seminal
figure of the Proustian aesthetics. As will be shown, one of the appeals of the Proustian oeuvre is its playing upon images and fragments from the universe of art, especially from the (early) Italian Renaissance. The author thereby creates a state of permanent perceptual disconcertion that does not only affect the way Swann and Marcel generate their own mental images and internal dummies (poupées intérieures) of the women
they desire but also evokes a kind of deliberate gender trouble questioning traditional gender norms.