“Intellectual Sewing”: Keeping Proust in Stitches

A new academic sub-discipline is born:

RhiannonWilliamsSewing Proust: Patchwork as Critical Practice,” Rhiannon Williams [pictured here], Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Volume 1, Number 1, November 2013 , pp. 43-56. (Thanks to investigator Neil Martin for bringing this to our attention.) The author, at the University of Derby, explains:

“I describe my own work, somewhat provocatively, as ‘intellectual sewing’ conducted in the manner of a critique. My methodology supports the agenda for integration of theory into practice, arriving at an interdisciplinary approach that promotes mutuality of theory with practice as a working model. In 2008 I began to cut up all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu and to hand stitch 3,000 pages of print into patchwork…. cogitates through practice, exploring the nature and experience of time at the beginning of the twenty-first century. That is to say, what might it mean to take apart then stitch together Proust’s Modernist text 100 years after its production?”

Proust-Restitched

An alternate version of part of the Williams text is online.

BONUS: Monty Python’s All-England Summarize Proust Competition: