QUART · Mirroring the Queer: Rewritings of the Albertine Episode

Mirroring the Queer: Rewritings of the Albertine Episode

The claim to greater visibility of marginalized individuals and communities in our times continues to collide with the constant return of reactionary politics. However, the emergence of creative works that propose viable alternatives to marginalization do not only offer exceptional aesthetic experiences but also carry political and ethical implications of great merit. Alternative ethico-political discourses that emerge from within literature and the arts may contribute to more nuanced understandings of human experience, give voice to marginalized individuals or communities and enable creative works to regain their cathartic, liberalizing, pleasurable or disquieting potential. Hence the importance of QUART, a multidisciplinary project that combines research in philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, queer studies, narrative theory, intermediality, and a range of artworks of different genres and media. QUART studies a cluster of recent works inspired by the character Albertine from Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu. The Proustian figure evokes a surprising intertextuality across different genres, art forms and media including a poetry pamphlet and a verse novel by Anne Carson, a play by Colin Duckworth, a musical by Richard Nelson and Ricky Ian Gordon, a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, films by Chantal Akerman and Véronique Aubouy and novels by Jacqueline Rose, Angela Carter and Hélène Cixous. This cluster of works offers a case of a cross-textual character appearing in alternative fictional worlds. At the same time, it fills the gaps of the strategic Proustian underrepresentation of Albertine in two ways: it either adapts the story in different genres and media or imagines a different destiny, ontology, pre/post history of the character. It conceptualizes her as a form of resistance at the intersection of sex, gender, race and class based on the premise that Albertine as a queer figure assumes the ethical act of taking the risk of one’s desire. She transforms the trauma of exclusion into a viable alternative realm, where values are distributed otherwise than according to the hegemonic order. The chosen artworks constitute different efforts to singularize difference. Each one of them weaves a somehow concrete outfit for Albertine in order for her not to be effaced in a general category of otherness. Rather, her transferability and her various cultural migrations cast her as a figure of queer cosmopolitanism. QUART was methodologically organized around a two-layered, yet simultaneous, approach, that translated into two main objectives: o To reconceptualize queerness through the different literary and artistic manifestations of Albertine. o To study the re-writings of the Albertine episode, focusing on the analysis of works belonging to different genres and media.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union