Novel selves: Mapping the subject in Stendhal, Nerval, and Proust

My dissertation focuses on how three French writers, Stendhal, Nerval, and Proust, explore the limits of a spatial representation of subjectivity. Ambiguous first-person narratives reveal a new understanding of subjectivity that moves away from a Cartesian model, towards one based on the play of language and the subject's relation to time. My first and second chapters contain a close reading of Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard, a text that combines novel, autobiography, and cartography. I trace the emergence of two distinct mapping systems, one that analyses and limits the narrator/subject, and a second that refuses any restriction of meaning and embraces intertextuality. In the third chapter, Gerard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient demonstrates how the writing of a travel narrative creates simultaneously the "Orient" as text and the textual subject that travels through it. Nerval's "Genealogie fantastique," Sylvie, and Aurelia are the focus of the fourth chapter, where the claustrophobic spaces of the text give way to a narrative that privileges time and alterity. The final two chapters argue that space in Proust's Recherche offers a misleading representation of the world and the subjects that occupy it. I show how Proust's narrator creates the effect of time by representing movement across a layered space.