From epistolary genre to poetic narrative

Proust shifts from an epistolary project to an admiring reading of a correspondence (which already has only the formal appearance of one), before ultimately arriving at a writing of the self. Novelists of memory and impression, Fromentin and Proust trace a quest for privileged moments through the landscape. The example of the sacred wood, quoted, drawn, and made the subject of ekphrasis, shows how a passage of poetic prose is born from a referential element contained in a letter and becomes intertext.