Sémiotique du jugement esthétique dans Le Côté de Guermantes de Marcel Proust
This master explores the production of meaning through aesthetic judgments in The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The narrator of this text, who admires creators like Elstir, Wagner and Hugo while despising Vibert, Auber and other artists like Bornier, develops a rich aesthetic discourse that contradicts the taste of most of the novel’s characters, whose artistical opinions are mostly exposed in the long social scenes that constitute a good context for artistic conversations as well as an obstacle to what Kant calls the « purity » of judgment. The signification of these passages relies on the presence of a code that, across In Search of Lost Time, provides instructions to the reader about the value of the different aesthetic unities to be judged as well as about the right way to appreciate a work of art. The analysis of this system’s structure (broken down in units, predicates, modalities, settings and processes) is an aspect of our work, which also consists of two lines of research. First, the aesthetical aspect is related to the position of the judgments between two poles : the one of the « pure aesthetic » inspired by Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which is a way of trying to make free and disinterested judgments prioritizing formal characteristics, opposed to the one of a « popular aesthetic » developed in Bourdieu’s La Distinction, which tends to judge a work with the same criteria used in judging an object in everyday life. Then, our narrative line of research explores the character building and the sociological function of artistic opinions. We answer those questions by analysing successively the pictorial, musical and literary aesthetical judgments in The Guermantes Way.
Marcel Proust The Guermantes Way Aesthetical judgments Taste Sémiotique Semiotics Painting Music Literature