Marcel Proust in Maceió: Memory, Subjectivity and Performance

This paper presents a pedagogical experience developed at the Federal University of Alagoas (Brazil) within a graduate course dedicated to the aesthetic, philosophical, and psychoanalytic dimensions of Marcel Proust's work. The course addressed the concepts of subject, language, and memory through selected fragments of ln Search of Lost Time, in dialogue with the works of Sigmund Freud and Jac­ques Lacan. Alongside theoretical analysis, the course culminated in two collective productions: a video performance in which students read excerpts from texts written during the semester in the Graduate Program in Literatura at UFAL, inspired by their reading of Proust; and an essay collection entitled Latin American Proustian Soirée. The project sought to displace Proustian memory from its European framework toward a situated Latin American context, transforming reading into a bodily and territorial practice. By articulating literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and creative writing, the experience explored how involuntary memory can operate as a pedagogical method and how the classroom can operate as a space for aesthetic experimentation and subjective reconfiguration.