Expressivism: The Vicissitudes of a Theory in the Writing of Proust and Barthes (Legenda/Research Monographs in French Studies, 6)

This book is a study of modern expressivism, understood as a body of thought committed to upholding the notion of art as `expression'. Gratton opens with a wide-ranging critical survey of modern expressivist theories, adducing certain recurrent elements that constitute these theories and others that threaten them. Expressivist discourses tend to wobble, but so too do anti-expressivist discourses, and in subsequent chapters Proust and Barthes are shown to be unable - or reluctant - to steer a straight course. In Proust, the movement of textualisation radically unsettles the `official' aesthetic programme a A la recherche du temps perdu , while in Barthes the move from a firmly anti-expressivist discourse to a more personalised writing manner unexpectedly allows a version of expressivism to gain a foothold in the postmodern context.