“Intellectual Sewing”: Keeping Proust in Stitches

A new academic sub-discipline is born:

“Sewing 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?”

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

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