Proust's Recherche

Proust's Recherche
Author: Randolph Splitter
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2023-08-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003807690

Originally published in 1981 and now reissued with a new preface by Randolph Splitter, this volume examines Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, showing that Marcel, the central character, like the novel itself, is characterized by an unstable equilibrium of opposing forces, so that he wishes both to dissolve the boundaries between inner and outer worlds, and to maintain divisions and defenses. Instead of trying to force the text into a rigid theoretical structure this reading of Proust’s novel illuminates it by confronting and re-examining the problems that Freudian theory itself addresses. In considering these problems, the author also takes into account the findings of modern French psychoanalysis and literary criticism, referring particularly to the work of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida.

Proust's Lesbianism

Proust's Lesbianism
Author: Elisabeth Ladenson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780801435959

For decades, Elisabeth Ladenson says, critics have misread or ignored a crucial element in Marcel Proust's fiction--his representation of lesbians. Her challenging new book definitively establishes the centrality of lesbianism as sexual obsession and aesthetic model in Proust's vast novel A la recherche du temps perdu. Traditional readings of the Recherche have dismissed Proust's "Gomorrah"--his term for women who love other women--as a veiled portrayal of the novelist's own homosexuality. More recently, "queer-positive" rereadings have viewed the novel's treatment of female sexuality as ancillary to its accounts of Sodom and its meditations on time and memory. Ladenson instead demonstrates the primacy of lesbianism to the novel, showing that Proust's lesbians are the only characters to achieve a plenitude of reciprocated desire. The example of Sodom, by contrast, is characterized by frustrated longing and self-loathing. She locates the work's paradigm of hermetic relations between women in the self-sufficient bond between the narrator's mother and grandmother. Ladenson traces Proust's depictions of male and female homosexuality from his early work onward, and contextualizes his account of lesbianism in late-nineteenth-century sexology and early twentieth-century thought. A vital contribution to the fields of queer theory and of French literature and culture, Ladenson's book marks a new stage in Proust studies and provides a fascinating chapter in the history of a literary masterpiece's reception.

The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust

The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust
Author: Howard Moss
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Total Pages: 125
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1589882873

"[The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust] reduces the ungainly and intricately designed masterpiece to its shape, and with hardly a wasted word...The paragraphs on habit and memory are truly wonderful—wonderful as explication, as psychology, and as philosophy."—John Updike "Almost everything Moss says seems to me right, illuminating, and new. This is the book of a mature and individual mind and sensibility, with a deep experience of moral, social, psychological, and aesthetic values which is rare among critics." —George D. Painter "A moving and inspiring book. Moss clears away dark corners, clarifies motivations, and places the huge work within the reader's perspective. A book of great value to the scholar and the general reader." —Publishers Weekly "Remembrance of Things Past is more than a novel; it is a work in which a single person's life is transformed into a mythology, with its own pantheon of gods, its own religious rituals, and its own moral laws. A total vision, it does not rely on any system outside itself for support. It is as if Dante had set out to write the Paradiso and the Inferno utilizing only the facts of his own existence without any reference to Christianity...Other novelists describe or invent worlds. Remembrance of Things Past is an entire universe created and interpreted by Marcel Proust." — from Chapter 1 "Moss lays out the sweeping claims and overarching structure of Remembrance of Things Past—the significance of Swann's Way and the Guermantes Way, or why there are such long party scenes—and is equally good at bringing to light all sorts of tiny, revealing details." — from the new Foreword by Damion Searls

Murasaki's Genji and Proust's Recherche

Murasaki's Genji and Proust's Recherche
Author: Shirley M. Loui
Publisher: Lewiston : E. Mellen Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1991
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

This study discusses the puzzling similarities of perspective, of psychological awareness, and of stylistic methods in these two unquestionably distinct and autonomous works.

The Fugitive

The Fugitive
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525505539

The long-awaited penultimate volume--"the very summit of Proust's art" (Slate)--in the acclaimed Penguin translation of Marcel Proust's greatest work, in time for the 150th anniversary of his birth "The greatest literary work of the twentieth century." --The New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper Peter Collier's acclaimed translation of The Fugitive introduces a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. The sixth and penultimate volume in Penguin Classics' superb new edition of In Search of Lost Time--the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s--brings us a more comic and lucid prose than readers of English have previously been able to enjoy. "Miss Albertine has left!" So begins The Fugitive, the second part of what is often referred to as "the Albertine cycle," or books five and six of In Search of Lost Time. As Marcel struggles to endure Albertine's departure and vanquish his loss, he ends up in an anguished search for the essential truth of the enigmatic fugitive, whose love affairs with other women provoke in him jealousy and a new understanding of sexuality. Eventually, he lets go of Albertine and begins to find himself, discovering his own long-lost inner sources of creativity. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (Illustrated)

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (Illustrated)
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher:
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2021-03-17
Genre:
ISBN:

No library's complete without the classics! The first volume of Proust's seven-part novel "In Search of Lost Time," also known as "A Remembrance of Things Past," "Swann's Way" is the auspicious beginning of Proust's most prominent work. A mature, unnamed man recalls the details of his commonplace, idyllic existence as a sensitive and intuitive boy in Combray. For a time, the story is narrated through his younger mind in beautiful, almost dream-like prose. In a subsequent section of the volume, the narrator tells of the excruciating romance of his country neighbor, Monsieur Swann. The narrator reverts to his childhood, where he begins a similarly hopeless infatuation with Swann's little daughter, Gilberte. More than this apparently fragmented narrative, however, is the importance of the themes of memory, time, and art that connect and interweave the man's memories. Considered to be one of the twentieth century's major novels, Proust ultimately portrays the volatility of human life in this sweeping contemplation of reality and time. Illustrated with book-end doodles about reading

Dying for Time

Dying for Time
Author: Martin Hägglund
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2012-10-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674067843

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.

Chardin and Rembrandt

Chardin and Rembrandt
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 63
Release: 2016-11-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1941701507

Chardin and Rembrandt is an unfinished essay written around 1895 by Marcel Proust. Oft overlooked in Prousts illustrious writing career, this book is a newly translated version by David Zwirner Books as one of the first two entries in its ekphrasis series. This essay is a literary experiment in which an unnamed narrator gives advice to a young man suffering from melancholy, taking him on an imaginary tour through the Louvre where his readings of Chardin imbue the everyday world with new meaning, and his ruminations on Rembrandt take his melancholic pupil beyond the realm of mere objects.

Memory and Understanding

Memory and Understanding
Author: Renate Bartsch
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9789027251992

This book treats memory and understanding on two levels, on the phenomenological level of experience, on which a theory of dynamic conceptual semantics is built, and on the neuro-connectionist level, which supports the capacities of concept formation, remembering, and understanding. A neuro-connectionist circuit architecture of a constructive memory is developed in which understanding and remembering are modelled in accordance with the constituent structures of a dynamic conceptual semantics. Consciousness emerges by circuit activation between conceptual indicators and episodic indices with the sensory-motor, emotional, and proprioceptual areas. This theory of concept formation, remembering, and understanding is applied to Proust s "A la recherche du temps perdu," with special attention to the author s excursions into philosophical and aesthetic issues. Under this perspective, Proust s work can be seen as an artistic exploration into our capacity of understanding, whereby the unconscious, the memory, is exteriorized in consciousness by presenting the experienced episodes in the conceptual order of similarity and contiguity through our capacity of concept formation. (Series A)