This volume sets Marcel Proust's masterwork, Á la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27), in its cultural and socio-historical contexts. Essays by the leading scholars in the ...field attend to Proust's biography, his huge correspondence, and the genesis and protracted evolution of his masterpiece. Light is cast on Proust's relation to thinkers and artists of his time, and to those of the great French and European traditions of which he is now so centrally a part. There is vivid exploration of Proust's reading; his attitudes towards contemporary social and political issues; his relation to journalism, religion, sexuality, science and travel, and how these figure in the Recherche. The volume closes with a comprehensive survey of Proust's critical reception, from reviews during his lifetime to the present day, including assessments of Proust in translation and the broader assimilation of his work into twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture.
Proust and emotion Wimmers, Inge Crosman
Proust and emotion,
2003, 20031031, 2014, 2003-01-01
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InProust and Emotion, Inge Crosman Wimmers proposes a new approach toA la recherche du temps perduthat centres on the role of affect. Through close reading of the hero-narrator's personal history, ...the author shows how emotional paradigms (especially separation anxiety), involuntary memory, and other compelling impressions give focus and structure to Proust's novel. Drawing on reader-oriented and emotion theories, she shows how affect commands the attention of the 'motivated reader' and is crucial to the process of self-understanding for both the narrator and the reader.
This is the first extensive study in English to take fully into consideration the drafts (esquisses) published in the new Pléiade edition of the novel, the Mauriac edition ofAlbertine disparue, and material from the unpublished Proust manuscripts - all of which shed further light on the importance of affect inA la recherche.Proust and Emotionwill appeal to readers interested in an approach to Proust that combines insights from philosophy, psychology, and literary aesthetics and in a poetics of reading that pays particular attention to emotion.
For forty years, scholars have had access to a vast array of documents that reveal the stages by which a few modest episodes grew into the vast and complex structure the world reveres as Marcel ...Proust's unique novel,A la recherche du temps perdu. Although many soundings have been made in this corpus, which comprises manuscript pages, exercise books, typescripts, and publisher's proofs, Anthony Pugh's study is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive view of the story that the documents reveal, at least in the years before the outbreak of war in 1914.
A crucial feature of the research is the rigorous establishment of the chronological sequence of the documents, a task complicated by Proust's habit of returning to sketches already written, amplifying them with extensive additions in the margins and on the facing pages, often reorganizing them, and finally reworking them in another form, sometimes physically intercalating pages of the first version into the new one. Anthony Pugh analyses with scrupulous care every document, facing all the multi-faceted problems they present, and showing why many solutions, some of them widely accepted by Proust scholars, have to be questioned.
It emerges from this investigation that however unsystematic Proust was in his method of composing, there is an inner logic in the way he oscillates between writing new incidents and editing texts already extant. Now, for the first time, the whole story of the way in whichA la recherche du temps perdugrew during the first six years of its gestation is told in full, both in its general thrust and in its fine details.
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.
Around Proust Goodkin, Richard E; Goodkin, Richard E
1991., 19910605, 1991, 1991-06-05
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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.
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 masterpieceÀ 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 series of seminars 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.
Mirages and mad beliefs Prendergast, Christopher; Prendergast, Christopher
2013., 20130721, 2013, 2013-07-21
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Marcel Proust was long the object of a cult in which the main point of reading his great novelIn Search of Lost Timewas to find, with its narrator, a redemptive epiphany in a pastry and a cup of ...lime-blossom tea. We now live in less confident times, in ways that place great strain on the assumptions and beliefs that made those earlier readings possible. This has led to a new manner of reading Proust, against the grain. InMirages and Mad Beliefs, Christopher Prendergast argues the case differently, with the grain, on the basis that Proust himself was prey to self-doubt and found numerous, if indirect, ways of letting us know. Prendergast traces in detail the locations and forms of a quietly nondogmatic yet insistently skeptical voice that questions the redemptive aesthetic the novel is so often taken to celebrate, bringing the reader to wonder whether that aesthetic is but another instance of the mirage or the mad belief that, in other guises, figures prominently inIn Search of Lost Time. In tracing the modalities of this self-pressuring voice, Prendergast ranges far and wide, across a multiplicity of ideas, themes, sources, and stylistic registers in Proust's literary thought and writing practice, attentive at every point to inflections of detail, in a sustained account of Proust the skeptic for the contemporary reader.
La figura del celoso es fundamental en la obra de Proust, y su primera manifestación es el personaje de Charles Swann. En este artículo se estudian las características de la novela del celoso, ...proponiendo como premisa central que se produce una dislocación de la estructura narrativa en pos de la trama, y que eso pone en jaque al personaje esteta porque lo enfrenta con las vicisitudes de la vida burguesa. La proliferación de acciones--materiales y también especulativas--que introducen los celos tensiona el problema de la autonomía del arte, eje central de la estética burguesa y principio rector de un representante del esteticismo como Swann. Sin embargo, los celos pueden también suponer, por la vía inversa, una restitución de la autonomía del arte, basada en la inutilidad de las investigaciones del enamorado y en la sumersión total en la trama de la vida práctica.
