“Prestige of a Momentary Diamond”: Economies of Distinction in Proust

Abstract

The essay examines Proust’s involvement in the “Lemoine Affair,” a diamond-fabrication scam that captured the French popular imagination in 1908. Lemoine’s hoax inspired Proust to undertake his own virtuosic exercise in fraud: in the year before he began drafting In Search of Lost Time, he published a series of pastiches in the newspaper— fictional accounts of the affair written in the styles of Balzac, Flaubert, Michelet, and others. These pastiches highlight Proust’s penchant for newspapers, magic tricks, and ventriloquistic play. Experiments in the phenomenology of “convulsive” and “unstable” preciosity, they reveal Proust’s fascination with the volatility of value and the peculiar status of the aesthetic object in modernity.

Almost Winning: Speculation, Temporality, and Casino Capitalism in Chekhov

“…3 A lot of recent scholarship has shed light on the interpenetration of modernism and financial speculation, focusing on the fictitious nature of money, the volatility of value, and modernists' experiments with the manipulation of aesthetic and commercial values. 4 And yet, while critics have explored Chekhov's representation of the randomness of daily life, his attention to the seemingly insignificant detail, and his predilection for events that are expected but "cannot come to pass," there has been little attention paid to how these aleatory elements reflect the instability, unpredictability, and moral relativism of the modern economy. 5 As Laurence Senelick notes, "Chekhov's interest in money is so prominent in his life and works that it is surprising that no one has studied it in more detail."…”