What Proust Heard

What Proust Heard
Author: Michael Lucey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2022-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226816680

Michael Lucey offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. What happens when we talk? This deceptively simple question is central to Marcel Proust’s monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. Both Proust’s narrator and the novel that houses him devote considerable energy to investigating not just what people are saying or doing when they talk, but also what happens socioculturally through their use of language. Proust, in other words, is interested in what linguistic anthropologists call language-in-use. Michael Lucey elucidates Proust’s approach to language-in-use in a number of ways: principally in relation to linguistic anthropology, but also in relation to speech act theory, and to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. The book also includes an interlude after each of its chapters that contextualizes Proust’s social-scientific practice of novel writing in relation to that of a number of other novelists, earlier and later, and from several different traditions, including Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rachel Cusk. Lucey is thus able to show how, in the hands of quite different novelists, various aspects of the novel form become instruments of linguistic anthropological analysis. The result introduces a different way of understanding language to literary and cultural critics and explores the consequences of this new understanding for the practice of literary criticism more generally.

What Proust Heard

What Proust Heard
Author: Michael Lucey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2022-03-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0226816672

Proust the Linguistic Anthropologist -- Interlude: Talk in Balzac and Eliot -- Idiotic Speech (Acts?) and the Form of In Search of Lost Time -- Interlude: Harmonizing Habitus in Woolf -- Proust and Bourdieu: Distinction and Form -- Interlude: Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk -- Conclusion: Animation and Statistics.

Proust's Songbook

Proust's Songbook
Author: Jennifer Rushworth
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2024-06-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1512825972

In Proust’s Songbook, Jennifer Rushworth analyzes and theorizes the presence and role of songs in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Instead of focusing on instrumental music and large-scale forms such as symphonies and opera, as is common in Proust musical studies, Rushworth argues for the centrality of songs and lyrics in Proust’s opus. Her work analyzes the ways in which the author inserted songs at key turning points in his novel and how he drew inspiration from contemporary composers and theorists of song. Rushworth presents detailed readings of five moments of song in À la recherche du temps perdu, highlighting the songs’ significance by paying close attention to their lyrics, music, composers, and histories. Rushworth interprets these episodes through theoretical reflections on song and voice, drawing particularly from the works of Reynaldo Hahn and Roland Barthes. She argues that songs in Proust’s novel are connected and resonate with one another across the different volumes yet also shows how song for Proust is a solo, amateur, and intimate affair. In addition, she points to Proust’s juxtapositions of songs with meditations on the notion of “mauvaise musique” (bad music) to demonstrate the existence of a blurred boundary between songs that are popular and songs that are art. According to Rushworth, a song for Proust has a special relation to repetition and memory due to its typical brevity and that song itself becomes a mode of resistance in À la Recherche—especially on the part of characters in the face of family and familial expectations. She also defines the songs in Proust’s novel as songs of farewell—noting that to sing farewell is a means to resist the very parting that is being expressed—and demonstrates how songs, in formal terms, resist the forward impetus of narrative.

Proust and the Arts

Proust and the Arts
Author: Christie McDonald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-11-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107103363

Offers new perspectives on Proust's complex and creative relation to a variety of art forms from different eras.

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust
Author: William C. Carter
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 998
Release: 2013-04-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300191790

Reissued with a new preface to commemorate the publication of "A la recherche du temps perdu" one hundred years ago, this title portrays in abundant detail the life and times of literary voices of the twentieth century.

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust
Author: Michael Wood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 127
Release: 2023-04-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192660799

A witty, refreshing, and fun book on the experience of reading Marcel Proust. What would the world be like without this work, where would we be if it hadn't happened? This is how Michael Wood found himself writing about Proust's work as an event and about events in relation to that work itself. The event that created the figure we know as Proust did not take a whole lifetime, we can date it to within certain months, perhaps certain weeks, of a certain year, 1908. That was when Proust the interesting occasional writer and full-time socialite, turned into an ostensible hermit and a real novelist. This short book says something about the event as a lifetime affair, and shows what the sudden change of 1908 looks like. It explores the work of Marcel Proust as an event in the world, something that happened to literature and culture and our understanding of history. This event has more aspects than we can count, but this book offers detailed critical snapshots of seven of them: the birth of Proust as a novelist; what he teaches us about the mythology of beginnings; about metaphor as a kind of rebellion; about love as a permanent anxiety attack; about the Dreyfus Affair; about the concept of justice; about the mythology of endings.

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust
Author: Joshua Landy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2024
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0197586554

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was arguably France's best-known literary writer. He wrote stories, essays, translations, and a 3,000-page novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus in which Joshua Landy invites the reader to view the novel as a single quest--a quest for purpose, enchantment, identity, connection, and belonging--through the novel's fascinating treatments of memory, society, art, same-sex desire, knowledge, self-understanding, self-fashioning, and the unconscious mind.

The World According to Proust

The World According to Proust
Author: Joshua Landy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2022-11
Genre:
ISBN: 0197648681

100 years after Proust's death, In Search of Lost Time remains one of the greatest works in World Literature. At 3,000 pages, it can be intimidating to some. This short volume invites first-time readers and veterans alike to view the novel in a new way. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was arguably France's best-known literary writer. He was the author of stories, essays, translations, and a 3,000-page novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus in which Joshua Landy invites the reader to view the novel as a single quest-a quest for purpose, enchantment, identity, connection, and belonging- through the novel's fascinating treatments of memory, society, art, same-sex desire, knowledge, self-understanding, self-fashioning, and the unconscious mind. Landy also shows why the questions Proust raises are important and exciting for all of us: how we can feel at home in the world; how we can find genuine connection with other human beings; how we can find enchantment in a world without God; how art can transform our lives; whether an artist's life can shed light on their work; what we can know about the world, other people, and ourselves; when not knowing is better than knowing; how sexual orientation affects questions of connection and identity; who we are, deep down; what memory tells us about our inner world; why it might be good to think of our life as a story; how we can feel like a single, unified person when we are torn apart by change and competing desires. Finally, Landy suggests why it's worthwhile to read the novel itself-how the long, difficult, but joyous experience of making it through 3,000 pages of prose can be transformative for our minds and souls.

Ah, What Is It? ‒ That I Heard

Ah, What Is It? ‒ That I Heard
Author: Anne Mounic
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2014
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 940121106X

The spirit of the narrative is mankind’s reflexive consciousness, or poetic genius ‒ our unique access to ourselves, our desperate endeavour “to be REAL”. It brings to light the dark unknown which is the zest of our lives; it gives shape to the tremor of our inner souls ‒ otherwise nearly imperceptible. “Ah, what is it? ‒ that I heard”, Katherine Mansfield wondered throughout her whole life and writings ‒ poems and stories, letters and notebooks. Through the metamorphic movement of her highly sensitive, perceptive mind, she highlights the deep ambivalence of light and dark, mirth and awe, fear and longing which is the keen feature of our naked existence. She sketches her epic motifs with a dedicated sense of wonder. A true poet, she returns, as Baudelaire, Keats, Hopkins, Proust, or Shakespeare, to the origins of language ‒ this poignant contrast of light and dark following the alternate rhythm of night and day, of yielding to darkness and converting it into speech: “Let there be light.” Poetic language is performative. It means an everlasting questioning over the abyss ‒ with wings of wonder upon the face of the deep. This volume will also be of interest to scholars and dedicated readers who wish to share in the current reassessment of Katherine Mansfield’s poetic achievement. Her awareness of the literary tradition and modernity, the utmost finesse of her artistic thought, the boldness of her temper make her a major twentieth-century poet.

The Melody of Time

The Melody of Time
Author: Benedict Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190206055

Music has been seen since the Romantic era as the quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. The Melody of Time explores the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of time, spanning the dynamic century between Beethoven and Elgar.