U of Ideas of General Interest -- April 2000
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Andrea Lynn, Humanities/Social Sciences Editor (217) 333-2177; [email protected]
LITERATURE
Proust symposium to draw scholars from around the world
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- When 60 scholars from around the world arrive in mid-April at what for them will be a new landscape -- the University of Illinois -- it's likely they'll know who once wrote, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
The scholars, on campus for an international symposium devoted to one of France's greatest writers, will know it was Marcel Proust who penned the memorable thought in his famous novel "A La Recherche du Temps Perdu" ("Remembrance of Things Past"). The symposium, "Proust 2000," to be held April 13-16 at various sites across campus and to include various musical and arts events, is only the third U.S. meeting to be dedicated to the works and criticism of Proust (1871-1922).
According to symposium organizer Caroline Szylowicz, Proust currently is a hot topic. Several biographies of him recently have been published, as have new editions of his novel. Indeed, his popularity extends worldwide, from the United States to England, France and Japan, she said.
Invited speakers and their topics include FranÃoise Leriche, Universite Jean Moulin, Lyon, "Proust -- an Art Nouveau Writer?"; Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa, Metropolitan Tokyo University, "Miss Sacripant and Her Models"; and Volker Roloff, Universitat-Gesamthochschule Siegen, "Desire, Imagination and Love: The Erotic Readings in 'La Recherche.' " A companion exhibition, "Marcel Proust: Memories, Mockeries and Medievalisms," will run March 31 to May 14 at the UI Krannert Art Museum.
The UI is a logical place to host an homage to Proust, since it is the home of a major Proust holding, the Kolb-Proust Archive for Research, in the UI Library. The archive, devoted to the study of Proust and his times, was built on the scholarship of the late Philip Kolb, a professor of French at the UI. Devoting nearly 60 years of his life to the study of Proust, beginning with his doctoral dissertation in 1935, Kolb edited, annotated and published 21 volumes of Proust correspondence. He was correcting proofs on the 21st volume when he died in 1992. Like Kolb, Proust worked essentially his entire life on a single monumental project, his novel, "La Recherche."
Among the items in the archive (www.library.uiuc.edu/kolbp) are some 40,000 3x5 index cards on which Kolb recorded the names of people, places, events and dates that Proust mentioned in his voluminous correspondence. The UI Rare Book and Special Collections Library holds some 1,100 letters between Kolb and correspondents, in addition to a prized collection of Proust books and manuscripts.
Szylowicz, the French-born Kolb-Proust librarian, is digitizing Kolb's material for an electronic database accessible on the Internet. She also fields dozens of queries every year about Proust and his work. By far the most frequently asked question -- at least four queries a month -- concerns the authorship of the quote about discovery. One of the first things Szylowicz will post on the database, she said, is the quote -- in several languages -- and a good deal of information about it.
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