Sunday 26 March, 11am

This is one of the many commonplaces about À la recherche du temps perdu: “Proust should not be illustrated”. And it is true that current editions are generally without pictures. However, there is no shortage of illustrated volumes, nor of other illustration ideas or projects, even during the author’s lifetime. The history of these illustrations is rich and fascinating (even the failures are!), and we would like to take a commented tour of it, from the first illustrated texts to the most contemporary book-objects.

Jan Baetens is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven, a specialist in the relationship between text and image, and the author of some twenty collections of poetry, most recently Après, depuis (2021) and Tant au tant (2022, quadrilingual edition: French, English, Dutch, Chinese). He has just published the essay Illustrer Proust. Histoire d’un défi, published by Impressions nouvelles.