Output details

'The Time I'm taking:Sewing Proust'

Routledge Readers in History.

With the addition of a new rationale, this chapter has been published in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice, ‘Sewing Proust: Patchwork as Critical Practice’ and presents new material that discusses hand sewing as a possible agent of wellbeing. The third occasion of publishing demonstrates the academic currency of this work within a broad arts and humanities context.

This essay, published initially in a pamphlet by the University of Derby to coincide with the

Critical Cloth exhibition, was selected by Dr Paul Martin (Ruskin College, Oxford) for inclusion in The Public History Reader. Two essays appear together: ‘Critical Cloth: to be Continued ...’ by Deborah Dean and ‘The Time I’m Taking: Sewing Proust’ by Rhiannon Williams.

‘The Time I’m Taking: Sewing Proust’ is a discreet piece of academic work that inquires into the

intellectual ramifications that result from reading, cutting up, then sewing back together, Marcel Proust’s novel ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’.

Employing literary and theoretical critiques (Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Malcolm Bowie, Richard Bales), the essay explores notions of narrative time in relation to stitched time. The over-arching theme is discussed with reference to labour, memory and creative production. Reading the ‘Recherche’ is vital to understanding Proust’s philosophy of time as lived human experience and it allows some comparison with the process of stitching through time (affiliated in textile culture discourse to concerns raised by Sue Prichard, Antonia Harrison and Marybeth C Stalp). Working with literary and textile criticism moved research towards the making an inter-disciplinary methodology for theoretical reflection upon textile practice.

In The Public History Reader, Dr Hilda Kean employs this paper to explore ‘Artists, Materials and Histories’ illustrating understandings of the past emanating from ‘material more commonly within the domain of art historians’. Importantly, the essay has been placed within the new humanities discipline of public history illustrating how ‘artists have played with the relationship between the ordinary and process, thus creating different perceptions of time and the past’.