The French and Japanese project CAHIERS-PROUST is a specific project nested within the projected edition of the « Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France », i. e. the seventy-five notebooks which the French author Marcel Proust (1871-1922) used from 1908 until his death to draft his unfinished masterpiece « A la recherche du temps perdu ». Launched in 2004 by a Franco-Japanese team under the leadership of Dr. Mauriac Dyer (ENS-CNRS, Paris) and Prof. Yoshikawa (Univ. Kyoto), the project « Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France » involves the publication of 7,000 manuscript pages (BnF – Brepols Publishers ; other editorial board members include Brun, Compagnon, Rey, and honorary committee Callu, Milly, Raimond, Tadié). It aims to create a canonical corpus for systematic genetic studies of Proust, as well as to make the Proustian manuscripts available to other research endeavours, such as general Proust studies, comparative genetic studies, cultural studies, linguistics and stylistics. Until now, to try to understand the complex web of textual transformations which lead to the published volumes of « A la recherche du temps perdu », Proust scholars relied on their own partial and fragmentary linear transcriptions. It was thus very difficult, even for their peers, to validate or falsify their (sometimes very complex) genetic hypotheses. Although the more comprehensive « Esquisses » in the « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade » edition (1987-1989) allow the general public to have access to a large portion of the thematic material in the notebooks, the choice of a simplified, text-oriented, format does not permit genetic enquiry. The current editorial project aims, on the other hand, at the integral diplomatic transcription of each of the seventy-five notebooks as the foundation of a full-scale genetic edition. Each notebook will be published as a set of two volumes : the first volume will have the colour facsimile of its pages and a diagram of the textual units, the second will have its diplomatic transcription and a developed apparatus criticus (introduction, historical and critical annotation, genetic annotation, content analysis, indexes of names, genetic links, etc.). The support of the CHORUS program (Japanese partner : 2005-June 2008, French partner : I/I/2006-3/30/2009) has helped the Franco-Japanese collaboration to ensure the publication of the first notebook, Cahier 54 (106 ff., Goujon, Mauriac Dyer, Nakano eds.), scheduled to be in print in the spring of 2008. The CAHIERS-PROUST project aims during its 36 months (1) to make available to collaborators a digital library of the corpus of the notebooks, to facilitate the transcription and annotation work ; digitization is to be made under the supervision of the BnF ; (2) to ensure the publication of five notebooks (Cahiers 71, 53, 55, 73, 64) and to forward in a significant way the editorial manuscript for six more, so as to reach a steady pace in the publication of the material (Cahiers 26, 34, 44, 56, 33 and 43) ; (3) to start sketching the Proust genetic hypertext, by realising, on the definitive diplomatic transcriptions of three notebooks at least (Cahiers 54, 71, 53), diagrams of genetic units, i. e. the passages, ranging from several pages to a few words, that are at least partially linked to other passages in other notebooks. Thus the aim of the CAHIERS-PROUST project is not only to establish the feasibility of the larger editorial project « Cahiers 1 à 75 » and to make a digital library available to scholars and the public alike, but to open the way to a systematic study of the processes of literary and intellectual creation, through the example of one of the great creative minds of the XXth century.

This project is built upon the association of three member institutions: the Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle-Paris 3, the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits modernes (CNRS), and the Département des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Its primary objective is to present and to reinterpret the archival material relating to the works of Emile Zola that are available at the present time. This will involve undertaking a genetic reading of these archives, which will provide answers to the essential problems raised by their classification and new perspectives on the author of the Rougon-Macquart series and of “J’accuse”. Three categories of archives will be subjected to scrutiny: a printed archive (the writer’s works and critical commentaries on them); a manuscript archive (the manuscripts and preparatory dossiers of the novels, from the BnF collections); and an iconographic archive (the iconography relating to the novels and to the Dreyfus Affair). This collective research programme, conducted in collaboration with the BnF, will bring together researchers of the “équipe Zola” working at the ITEM and at the Université de Paris 3. During the course of the four years in question, the evolving research activities will be supported by the organisation of a seminar and of three study days. At the end of the process, there will be a colloquium, which will make it possible to take stock of the achievements made. All of these activities will result in publications. From an academic perspective, this project seeks to apply the theories and methods of genetic criticism to the full range of the Zola archives: on the basis of the manuscript archive, it will aim to elaborate a “genetics of the series”, capable of analysing the internal dynamics of the preparatory dossiers of the Rougon-Macquart; furthermore, in a parallel procedure, by means of a thorough analysis of the printed and iconographic archives in all their diversity, it will seek to arrive at a “genetics of reception”, whose aim will be to link up the problematics of both genetic and reception studies. There will be particular emphasis on an approach to Zola’s works which would not be purely philological, but which would open up a “cultural genetics”, exploring, within the content of the preparatory dossiers, the traces of the presuppositions of a collective discourse, the associative and derivative links between this discourse and the initial soliloquy of the writer. Similarly, in the area of reception, the research will involve bringing to the fore, within its historical evolution, the full range and diversity of the relevant literary criticism to reveal how this criticism had an impact on Zola’s writing practices, thereby leading the novelist to rethink the bases of his aesthetic. These scientific hypotheses will be validated in three ways : by developing and ordering the various relevant corpuses of archives; by producing critical editions which will favour a better appreciation and understanding of the texts subjected to theoretical scrutiny; and , lastly, in the final stage of the project, by the construction of an internet site which will bring together in electronic form the full range of the archives that will have been classified and the editions that will have been produced. A pedagogical feature will complete the undertaking in order to open up this wealth of scientific data to the broadest possible audience.