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Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu figures same-sex desire as a minimal form of social connectedness, in which contingency affords a sufficient basis for sociality. In the social worlds that Proust called 'Sodome' and 'Gomorrhe,' relationships and encounters tend to be imagined as products of pure contingency, unaccompanied by the kinds of shared norms or tokens of mutual understanding that might conventionally underwrite a stable community. In accordance with a view of contingency articulated by Niklas Luhmann, however, the very absence of these sustaining structures allows contingency itself to operate in the novel as a precarious form of cohesion. In La Recherche, social contingency is often figured using the trope of contiguity (contingency's etymological cousin), so that mere accidental next-to-ness is enough to create a connection between otherwise unrelated characters. In a novelfascinated by transversal links between seemingly distant social milieux, Proust's representation of same-sex desire functions as a network of shortcuts, conjuring contiguity out of apparent distance. These unapologetically improbable networks register the historical unavailability of more stable social structures, but also illustrate what Leo Bersani calls an 'anticommunitarian' model of collective life, which is not organized around the community as a social ideal. Keywords: contingency / same-sex desire / Marcel Proust / sociality / social interaction / verisimilitude, The novel as a genre is often associated with contingency. The 'great novelist [is] ... not afraid' of it, in Iris Murdoch's morally bracing formulation, but rather faces up to [...]

He influence of Beethoven on Eliot's Four Quartets is mediated by Wagner and Schopenhauer and relates fundamentally to the philosopher's understanding of instrumental music as expressing a universalised and abstract [...]

Muriel Draper, a once preeminent American modernist literary figure, turned conversation into a mode of authorship through her varied career as a salon hostess, writer, and radio broadcaster. The archival papers surrounding her memoir of her music salon, Music at Midnight (1929), and her NBC radio program, 'It's a Woman's World' (1937-1938), reveal that Draper's contribution to modernism was not literature as we typically conceive it. By providing an alternative articulation of literary form, which blended oral and written modes, her memoir and radio show activated a network of female fan mail writers. Correlating conversation with the music of her salon, Draper challenged modernist claims about music's impersonality while also encouraging her audience to take seriously the literary merits of their talk. From her audience of listeners and readers emerged a public of women writers, for whom the smallest acts of literary participation gained importance through Draper's example. Keywords: Muriel Draper/modernist salons/music/memoir/1930s radio, Four years before Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas would become a bestseller, catapulting Stein from relative obscurity to celebrity, her friend Muriel Draper published a memoir of [...]