This book confronts the singularity of the relationship between two exemplary writers of the last century in order to challenge and to reinvigorate our notions of what art and criticism - literary or otherwise - can do. While it takes Roland Barthes's encounters with Marcel Proust's monumental masterpiece � la recherche du temps perdu as its specific focus, the implications of its argument are far-reaching. Indeed, the book argues that Barthes's writing on Proust's work between the early 1950s and 1980 (including a substantial set of unpublished notes for a seminar delivered at the University of Rabat in 1969-1970) proposes not only a critical culture of Proust that is productively inconsistent, but also, more generally, a fresh understanding of criticism as a creative activity that embraces insecurity and variation as it refuses to remain fixed upon reassuringly stable themes, meanings and interpretations.