Teamwork!

So Tony and I were talking today, and given the obvious overlap of both our interests and our reading-lists, we thought it might be fun to collaborate on something. After some back-and- forth with ideas, we decided that co-authoring something on Swann's Way-- which we're both currently reading-- might be good fun. We're doing the writing in true Deleuze and Guattari style: someone starts, sends it to the other who adds and edits, sends it back to the first for more adding and editing, and so it goes until we get tuckered out.
I'm pretty sure we decided that Tony was the schizoid Deleuzian and I the psychoanalytic Guattarian.

First off, I completely left off Joyce (whoops!). I know some of you are probably thinking "but, wait, he's Irish, not British...". Very true. But so, in fact, was Wilde. The reason we're more prone to remember Joyce as "the Irish author" over others (such as Wilde) is that Joyce both lived in Ireland (and wrote extensively about it) and was notably preoccupied with the discomfort he felt in speaking and writing in a language that was not his own. Many of his literary masterpieces arose from his internal battles over the role of the British language in his life and fiction; he felt it to be simultaneously his and yet alien to him-- somehow outside his control... always just escaping him.
Anywhoo, Wilde didn't have those very nationalized anxieties and lived and worked quite comfortably in the Britain (until he was imprisoned, of course). So, to finally get to the point of why I'm including either of these authors, its because, although not British, they both represent different and invaluable perspectives on linguistic expression and the power of cultural to shape the personal.

And, as an update, right now I'm about half way through Swann's Way.

Things to Read:

British and French Fiction:
Proust: Swann's Way
Colette: Gigi
Gide: The Immoralist
Crevel: Putting My Foot In It, Difficult Death
Cocteau:
Carco: Perversity
Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
Genet: Notre Dame des Fleurs
Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal
DH Lawrence: Everything
Conrad: (re-read) The Secret Sharer
Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Forester: (re-read) A Room with a View
Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Voyage Out, (re-read) Orlando

Theory:
Irigaray: The Sex Which is Not One
Streit: Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions
Sedgwick: Touching Feeling, Between Men

To be continued...