SOURCE: Rosengarten, Frank. “A Profusion of Intertextuality.” In The Writings of the Young Marcel Proust (1885-1900): An Ideological Critique, pp. 137-55. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

In the following essay, Rosengarten identifies several literary influences on Pleasures and Regrets.

Proust's work is like a lens where all the tendencies of our literature converge.

—Simone Kadi, La Peinture chez Proust et Baudelaire

As a critical approach to various forms of literary appropriation by one writer of another writer's work—images, stylistic mannerisms, epigraphic passages, technical devices, even plagiarism, an example of which, according to Anne Henry, is Proust's use of Tolstoyan death scenes for several of the short stories in [Les plaisirs et les jours]—the study of intertextuality has become a staple of contemporary literary criticism. Julia Kristeva, who helped to popularize the term, considers it a key component of the poststructuralist view of writing as perpetually open to...