Reading Proust as he writes

Thanks to the progress of digitization, we can now realize genetic editions that give priority to the draft manuscripts themselves ("documentary editions"). Focusing on three recent such editions of Proust's drafts, we explore the new status of reading. At the transcription level what is ideally at stake is the mimetic re-enactment of in-progress writing. At a wider scale, the reader is invited to reconstruct the genetic relationships between a great number of documents. Massive digitization, however, might better allow for transversal surfing across documents as well as limited, well-circumscribed electronic editions that are more easily accessible to the general public.