IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
Spring 2015
Faculty: Stacey Davis, x6761, Sem2 C3104, davisst@evergreen.edu
Sam Schrager, x6335, Sem2 C2110, schrages@evergreen.edu
How does memory shape our identity and sense of the world? This inquiry explores the
interplay of personal and collective experience in forming the narratives people tell about their
pasts. It looks at strategies for representing repressed aspects of the past in communities and
societies. We will take Marcel Proust’s masterpiece of modern literature, In Search of Lost Time,
as focus and inspiration for examining these issues. Proust crystallized key psychological,
cultural and sociological concerns of the emerging "modern age"; to put his novel in context,
we’ll study fin-de-siècle European and intellectual history and thinkers. We’ll also study
folklore, nonfiction, fiction, and films that offer powerful insights into dynamics of memory.
Students will create their own original research and writing on memory. Those proficient in
French will be able to read portions of Proust in French if they wish.
Required texts:
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (6-pack), tr Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright. Modern Lib, 2003
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Harvard U. Press, 2003
Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder. U. California Press, 2015
Octavia Butler, Kindred. Holt McDougal Library, 2004
Weekly schedule:
Monday
9:30-11:00
1:00-3:00
Wednesday
9:30-12:30
Thursday
9:30-11:30
12:00-1:15
1:30-4:00
Lecture/Discussion
Proust Seminar
Sem2 D3105
Sem2 D2107, D2109
Reading/Workshop
on Ancillary Texts
Sem2 D1105
Proust Seminar
Research/Writing Methods
Film/Discussion
Sem2 D2107, D2109
Sem2 D2107, D2109
Sem2 D1105
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Breakdown by week:
Week 1
Swann’s Way, 1-64 (Mon), 65-186 (Thurs)
Mar 30-Apr 2 Workshop on Portfolios: Computer Center Mac Lab 2619 (Wed 12-1pm)
Film: Boyhood, dir. Richard Linklater (2014) (class goes ‘til 4:30)
Week 2
Apr 6-9
Swann’s Way, 186-356
Robert Herbert, Impressionism pdf
David Harvey, “Consumerism, Spectacle and Leisure” pdf
Patrice Higonnet, “Capital of Alienation” pdf
Film: Stories We Tell, dir. Sarah Polley (2012)
Turning Point paper due Monday of week 2 (2-3 pages)
Week 3
Apr 13-16
Swann’s Way, 356-543
Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder
Film: Ida, dir. Pawel Pawlikowski (2014)
Week 4
Apr 20-23
Within a Budding Grove, 49-58; 299-502
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 10-64 (chapters 1, 2)
Guest Speaker: Trevor Speller (Mon)
Reading Proust with Patrick McMahon (who’s with us for the week) (Thurs)
Week 5
Apr 27-30
Within a Budding Grove, 502-730
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” pdf (Mon)
Keith Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places” pdf (Wed)
Film: After Life, dir. Hirokazu Koreeda (1998)
First project paper due Thursday of week 5 (4-5 pages)
Week 6
May 4-7
The Guermantes Way, 313-328; 384-403; 425-472; 782-819
Sodom and Gomorrah, 1-44, 699-723
Ann-Louise Shapiro, “The Sexual Politics of Female Criminality” pdf
Film: La Captive, dir. Chantal Akerman (2000)
Week 7
May 11-14
The Captive, 1-30, 253-440
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations” link online (Mon)
Octavia Butler, Kindred (Wed)
Film: Night Catches Us, dir. Tanya Hamilton (2010)
Speaker: Sarah Fox, Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West (Th, 12-2)
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Week 8
May 18-21
Time Regained, 1-237
Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 232-312 (part of ch. 8; chapters 9, 10, 11)
Film: La Grande Illusion, dir. Jean Renoir (1937)
Full essay for memory project due Thursday of week 8
Week 9
May 26-28
Memorial Day – No class Monday
Time Regained, 238-425
Student presentations week 9 on Wednesday
Film: Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouvé), dir. Raul Ruiz (1999)
Week 10
June 1-4
Time Regained, 425-532
Student presentations Monday, Wednesday, Thursday
Final revisions on memory project due Wednesday of week 10
Writing
THE PORTFOLIO
The breadth of our exploration of memory—full-bore Proust, other fascinating thinkers, your
own research projects—makes In Search of Lost Time quite an innovative inquiry. So we’ve set
up our website for you to create a portfolio of writing over the quarter that can be viewed by
both classmates and readers beyond the college. These posts will form a collective picture of
our program’s work.
The selections will include some of your best journal entries and three papers: a brief
autobiographical piece, a close reading of a passage in Proust, and your finished Memory
Project essay. The writing assignments are described below. (Workshop to create your Portfolio
website: Computer Center Mac Lab 2619, Wed, April 1, 12-1pm. If you’d prefer not to post
publicly under your name, you’ll set up an alias then.)
THE JOURNAL
In keeping with the spirit of Proust’s novel, which bursts with observation and reflection,
surprising experiences and untamable memories, you’ll compose a good part of your writing as
a journal. Think of it as an ongoing record of things that you do, see, and think about over the
next two-and-a-half months, in and apart from class. The Journal is both personal and
intellectual. Experiences and ideas feed off one another. The narrator’s time in Combray may
evoke your childhood and hometown, for instance. The French aristocracy mirrors celebrity in
America. Art and storytelling, identity and sexuality, politics and morality, remembering and
forgetting, shape human lives, here and everywhere.
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These are the types of journal entries that we envision:
- accounts of experiences you have, or events you observe, during this period of time
(the details will be most reliable if you document what happened the same day or
the next);
- memories of experiences/events from your past, near and distant, that you find
significant;
- close readings of—and ruminations about—texts and ideas of our inquiry, including
Proust, ancillary readings, films, seminar talk, lectures, etc.;
- discussion of thinkers, ideas, current politics, art, etc. you encounter on your own
(including interrogation related to your Memory Project);
- depictions of your dreams, imaginary dialogues with persons living or dead,
experiments with fiction or historical imagination, etc.
If this range sounds a bit intimidating, don’t worry. It’s your journal. You decide what goes in it.
Trust that you’ll find many things to write about as you engage with the scope of our studies
and the Journal-space. We strongly encourage you, though, not to limit yourself to one or two
kinds of entries. Think about balance. Feel free to experiment. Your sense of possibilities will
expand by reading examples of peers’ efforts. And faculty will help.
One suggestion upfront: Note the difference between description and interpretation. The
proportion of these activities varies, depending on the kind of entry you’re writing, but often it
takes both to make an entry persuasive. You describe something—an experience, say, or a
passage—so the reader can grasp it, and then you offer your interpretation of what’s going on.
These are requirements for the Journal: (1) Include, over the quarter, multiple kinds of entries,
some more intellectual, others more personal, touching on a variety of aspects of our inquiry.
(2) Write at least two substantive entries weekly. (3) Date each entry. (4) Post one entry to your
Portfolio weekly, or at least every other week.
You can write your journal by hand between the covers of a bound journal, or on a keyboard,
and keep it as a blog. (The portfolio workshop will end with instruction for making a TESC blog
for your journal, if there’s time.) Whatever format you choose, you’ll show the journal to
faculty at mid- and end of quarter to verify the work.
PAPER #1: A TURNING POINT
There is a charged moment at the beginning (pp. 46-49) of Proust’s novel when the narrator,
who’s supposed to be in bed but must have a kiss from his mother, converges with his parents
at the top of the stairs. He’s terrified he’ll be punished, but to his great surprise his father tells
his mother to spend the night in his room. The narrator’s victory, we discover in the following
pages, is bittersweet. This episode, to which he alludes many times in the course of the novel,
represents a turning point in his young life.
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We want you to write an account of a turning point in your life—an experience that happened,
at whatever age, that has reverberated for you since. Compose it as a narrative, so the reader
can picture the event, and convey how it’s affected you—how, for example, it changed your
sense of self, how you see the world. (2-3 pp., double-spaced; due Monday, April 6, at lecture;
post in portfolio )
PAPER #2: READING A PASSAGE FROM PROUST
You will write a 4-5 page close analysis of one passage from In Search of Lost Time. This paper
will be due the day before you present your close reading to your seminar. You’ll post this
essay in your portfolio so your classmates can read it before the seminar. You’ll receive more
detailed instructions in your seminar.
PAPER #3: EXCERPT FROM YOUR MEMORY PROJECT
You will write a fully-crafted, stand-alone essay on one aspect of your larger memory project.
The form this paper will take depends on your individual memory project. For students
undertaking studies that are largely text-based (historical, literary, philosophical or memoirs
inspired by a text), this essay will be a critical book review of one key text for your project. If
your memory project is based primarily on observations and interviews, this essay might
include excerpts, description, and discussion of the stories, persons and community you are
studying. You will receive specific guidelines for this paper in your project workshop group. (45 pp., double-spaced; due Thursday, April 30, at seminar)
PAPER #4: MEMORY PROJECT ESSAY (2 drafts)
You will submit your final memory essay twice: first on Thursday of week 8, May 21, and then
again with final revisions after faculty and peer feedback on Wednesday of week 10, June 3.
You will post both versions in your portfolio and bring paper copies to class.
The Memory Project
As a major piece of the work this quarter, students will research and write about memory-inaction—crafting a memoir, an oral history, fieldwork in a community, or a textual or librarybased investigation of an historical or cultural memory-topic that grows out of our studies.
Each student will develop a polished piece with guidance from faculty and dialogue with peers.
Although the specifics of the final finished project will differ according to the type of work
undertaken, in general the end result will be a final essay of 15 to 25 pages in length. During
weeks 9/10 of the quarter, each student will give a 5 minute presentation to the entire class of
their project and its conclusions.
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Students will work on their individual memory project throughout the quarter; by the second
week they’ll decide which type of project they’d like to do. They’ll join a “project workshop” on
research/writing methods headed by one of the two faculty members, where each week (on
Thursdays from 12-1:15) they will get feedback, hone techniques, and embark on the different
stages of the project work. Students may or may not end up working with the same faculty
member they have for seminars – that will be determined by the topic and scope of their
individual memory project.
Examples of potential types of memory projects:
Historical research: For this type of project, the student will use secondary scholarship (books
and articles) to explore a particular aspect of modern Europe/America (preferably from the late
19th or early 20th centuries). For example, a student might ask, “What was the impact of the
horrors of World War I on attitudes about gender relations in France and/or Britain the decade
following the war?” A topic could be art historical in nature: for example, a student could start
a study by hoping to uncover “the links between impressionist depictions of leisure and new
forms of tourism in the late 19th-century.” This sort of research could also lean more towards
intellectual history, as in a study comparing Freud’s and Bergson’s ideas on memory and its
meanings. For advanced students, especially seniors interested in capstone projects, this kind
of research could include a focus on the analysis of primary source materials as well (like
newspaper articles from the period studied).
Literary research: For this type of project, the student would use both secondary sources and
the analysis of primary materials (here, pieces of literature themselves). Examples of this sort
of project include, “a comparison of dreams, memory and identity in three novels by Virginia
Woolf,” or “the analysis of the search for lost love in Alain-Fournier’s novel Les Grands
Meaulnes.”
Memoir inspired by philosophical, literary or historical research: For this type of project, the
student would craft a polished memoir focused on questions, themes or events they explored
through the study of philosophical, literary or historical text(s). For example, a student
interested in crafting a memoir around the construction of his/her own gender identity might
first pursue reading into the solidification of gender categories in the late 19 th century as a
framework for these inquiries. Or, a student interested in exploring the notion of “embracing
what one is” might embark on a close reading of Nietzsche to complement her or his memoir
writing.
Life history fieldwork: In this kind of project, the student chooses a person whose life, for
whatever reason, seems remarkable, and documents his or her memories in depth. The
narrator might be a local character, a relative, a figure in the community, someone you
admire—and is typically a generation or two older. Through interviews wherein the person
speaks freely, you create a portrait that conveys his or her stories, outlook, and way of being in
the world. (For a stirring example, check Joseph Mitchell’s “Lady Olga,” online under week 1
readings.)
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Communal memory fieldwork: In this kind of project, the student explores an event, a
situation, a place, or an issue from the recent or more distant past that still evokes strong
memories among members of a group or community. For example: a neighborhood’s initiative
to develop a garden; a city’s controversy over police practices; a family’s change of fortunes; an
ethnic group’s traumatic past. You document people’s stories, feelings, and multiple points of
view about the topic, and write about what, individually and collectively, it means to them.
Historical representation fieldwork: In this kind of project, the student investigates how a
specific institution portrays the past, to the public and to itself. You might, for example, watch
an American history class at a local high school and talk with the teacher and students. You
might hang out at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle and engage staff and visitors. Or you
might look at how TESC, a local faith organization, a state lobbying group, or Ft. Lewis present
and conceive their history. With observation, interview, and background research, you can
trace the institution’s public narrative and inner conflicts, what it remembers and represses and
why.
Time line for Memory Project Work:
Please note: The specifics of each assignment will vary by project workshop group. Your
faculty member will give you detailed assignment guidelines, including work due dates specific
to the two separate project workshops.
Week 2: (Wednesday, April 8): Project proposal due
Week 5: (Thursday, April 30): First project paper due (4-5 pages)
Week 8: (Thursday, May 21): Full project essay due
Weeks 9/10: Individual presentations of projects
Week 10: (Wednesday, June 3) Revised essay due