Objects

Abstract

Chapter One engages with Barthes’s discussion of a classical distance from worldly objects and of a modern – nouveau roman-esque – chosisme (which is predicated, Barthes says, upon a certain proximity between people and things) in order to bring the landscapes of Proust’s novel into relief. The chapter also reads Barthes’s paradoxical integration of Proustian elements within his own writing on the nouveau roman as a reflection – a rewriting – of the liminal (the simultaneously classical and modern) texture of À la recherche itself.