Narratives of Resistance and Remembering in Marcel Proust's Railway Station.

Modernity's drive to optimize and regulate urban space manifests in the metropolitan railway station, a structure whose emergence in the nineteenth-century remade spatiotemporal practices. While the station's utilitarianism would seem antithetical to artistic expression, it became an unlikely site of creative resistance at the turn of the century. Taking In Search of Lost Time as a case study, I argue that Marcel Proust challenges the hegemonic spatial practices of emerging capitalist systems by reimagining the railway station as a site for modern poetics and memory. In reappropriating the railway station timetable as a site of modern poetics, Proust renders comprehensible one of modernity's most depersonalized, abstract spaces – and, in representing train stations as mnemotechnic devices, identifies a narrative potential inherent even in quotidian urban locales. Proust's railway station illuminates important questions about the architectural lineage of modernist literature and the narrative capacities of each discipline, while also encouraging renewed understanding of their reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]