Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27) changed the course of modern narrative fiction. This Introduction provides an account of Proust's life, the socio-historical ...and cultural contexts of his work and an assessment of his early works. At its core is a volume-by-volume study of In Search of Lost Time, which attends to its remarkable superstructure, as well as to individual images and the intricacies of Proust's finely-stitched prose. The book reaches beyond stale commonplaces of madeleines and memory, alerting readers to Proust's verbal virtuosity, his preoccupations with the fleeting and the unforeseeable, with desire, jealousy and the nature of reality. Lively, informative chapters on Proust criticism and the work's afterlives in contemporary culture provide a multitude of paths to follow. The book charges readers with the energy and confidence to move beyond anecdote and hearsay and to read Proust's novel for themselves.
At the turn of the 20th century, parts of the peaceful suffragists had grown frustrated with the lack of progress that had been made towards women’s suffrage. From this frustration new organisations ...were established that turned to more radical and, at times, violent strategies to draw attention to their cause. This paper focuses on the militant part of the fight for women’s suffrage and the effect the militancy had on the contemporary view of the women’s rights movement. The paper argues that despite creating a negative view of the women’s suffrage movement, the militant efforts weren’t entirely wasted since it created publicity for the movement and helped restart the discussion on women’s suffrage.
Newton argues that socialist women and their concerns posed a radical challenge to the male-dominated left. Early socialist women fought to be treated as equals and actively debated popular women's ...issues, including domestic work, women in industry, sexuality, and women's suffrage. They provided a unique and vibrant perspective on these issues and challenged the middle-class bias inherent in the women's movement.
Dying for Time Hagglund, Martin
2012, 2012-10-29, 2012-10-30
eBook
Novels by Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time. Hägglund gives them another reading entirely: fear of time and death is generated by investment in ...temporal life. Engaging with Freud and Lacan, he opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.
This book traces the idea of the unconscious as it emerges in French and European literature. It discusses the functioning of the normal unconscious mind and provides examples of the abnormal ...unconscious in poems and literature. Psychiatric cases as they are understood today are illustrated as mirrored in literature describing the functioning of the disturbed mind.
The dozens of writings on traveling Europe by motor car published between 1900 and 1914 suggest a broad enthusiasm regarding novel modes of seeing that were afforded by the new technology: ...consistently, the authors emphasized the degree of flexibility and spontaneity offered by the motor car, and contrasted travel by car with train travel, which was often cast as undesirably rigid. They also stressed the speeds attainable in motor cars, and began to describe a related development of perceptual habits, claiming that motorists gradually learned to see the landscape through a series of increasingly rapid and detailed impressions. Above all, however, these accounts accented the immediacy of experience possible in the motor car, arguing that its openness granted motorists a fuller, more direct experience of the environment. Yet a close reading of the texts reveals that early motorists' interactions with the landscape were never, in fact, fully unmediated. Instead, motorists saw their surroundings through a number of filters, conventions and preconceptions that affected their reactions. From the uncomfortable goggles worn by most motorists to the guidebooks that they took with them, they perceived the passing environment through lenses that ranged from concrete to abstract; indeed, even the value of their cars acted as a material symbol that often differentiated them from their rural surroundings. As a result, these early texts point to a central tension, also visible in other discourses of the period, between a desire for direct access and an abiding interest in preserving social and cultural boundaries.
Around Proust Goodkin, Richard E; Goodkin, Richard E
1991., 19910605, 1991, 1991-06-05
eBook
A study in obsession, Marcel Proust'sA la recherche du temps perduis seemingly a self-sufficient universe of remarkable internal consistency and yet is full of complex, gargantuan digressions. ...Richard Goodkin follows the dual spirit of the novel through highly suggestive readings of the work in its interactions with music, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cinema, and such literary genres as epic, lyric poetry, and tragedy. In exploring this fascinating intertextual network, Goodkin reveals some of Proust's less obvious creative sources and considers his influence on later art forms. The artistic and intellectual entities examined in relation to Proust's novel are extremely diverse, coming from periods ranging from antiquity (Homer, Zeno of Elea) to the 1950s (Hitchcock) and belonging to the cultures of the Greek, French, German, and English-speaking worlds. In spite of this variety of form and perspective, all of these analyses share a common methodology, that of "digressive" reading. They explore Proust's novel not only in light of such famous passages as those of the madeleine and the good-night kiss, but also on the basis of seemingly small details that ultimately take us, like the novel itself, in unexpected directions.
