How to Critically Inherit Modernism? Gender Issues in Chantal Akerman’s and Anne Carson’s Rewritings of Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Abstract

Just as Eliot, in his famous The Tradition and the Individual Talent , peremptorily posits that the value of an author can only be established by placing him “among the deads ones” and comparing him with them, so the heirs of Modernism seem to be aware of the impossibility of simply getting rid of the past. Conceived as a reservoir of shared images that guarantee to individuals their allegiance to a society, tradition has nevertheless ceased to be organized as a series of authority figures arranged in a linear and compartmentalized pattern over the centuries, resulting in everyone seemed to have acquired the right to take freely from it in order to establish a permanent parallelism with the present. Drawing on the example provided by Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout and Chantal Akerman’s La Captive, this essay aims at investigating the way contemporary female authors can critically inherit from Modernist tradition (and from Proust in particular), that is to say acknowledge its authority without fully accepting its legacy.