Proust In Perspective

Download or read book Proust in Perspective written by Armine Kotin Mortimer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002-08-07 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcel Proust speaks to us today as a contemporary and a classic. His great novel resonates across languages and time, summing up the past, interpreting the present, and envisioning the future. For Proust in Perspective, scholars from France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Canada, and the United States have drawn on rich new editions of Proust's novel and correspondence to bring us fresh views of his work. In nineteen original essays, a foreword by Jean–Yves Tadié, and an introduction by editors Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb, this volume guides readers through the dense weave of Proust's fiction and correspondence. The essays take us into the realm of Proustian language–-as quotation, metaphor, and memory–-and into art history and musical ideology, connecting the art of words with the words of art. They explore the interface of history and fiction, the mysteries of the text's evolution, and the dilemmas of its publication. They present the revelations of genetic criticism and the surprises of gender analysis. Taken together, these essays conjure a multifaceted profile of Proust–-his work, life, character, and influence–-and of new directions in Proust scholarship today. With compelling rigor and infectious enthusiasm, Proust in Perspective conveys the magnitude of Proust's continuing appeal.

Download or read book The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust written by Howard Moss and published by Paul Dry Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[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

Download or read book Proust and the Squid written by Maryanne Wolf and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Wolf restores our awe of the human brain—its adaptability, its creativity, and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles.” — San Francisco Chronicle How do people learn to read and write—and how has the development of these skills transformed the brain and the world itself ? Neuropsychologist and child development expert Maryann Wolf answers these questions in this ambitious and provocative book that chronicles the remarkable journey of written language not only throughout our evolution but also over the course of a single child’s life, showing why a growing percentage have difficulty mastering these abilities. With fascinating down-to-earth examples and lively personal anecdotes, Wolf asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians is a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today’s technology-driven literacy, in which visual images on the screen are paving the way for a reduced need for written language—with potentially profound consequences for our future.

Download or read book The Proust Questionnaire written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcel Proust's questionnaire is one of the best-known interviews devices used in the media nowadyas. Fun, intelligent, and concise, its reveals much of the personality of those questioned.“ While the Maison Gerard Darel has recently purchased the original Marcel Proust questionairre, Assouline Publishing puts forth a facsimile version that contains Marcel Proust's handwritten replies. An introduction by Henry-Jean Servat, a ling-standing member of the Friends of Marcel Proust Society, provides a historical account of the questionnaire.“ In addition the book includes questionnaires filled by important persons with various cultural backgrounds: people such as Diane von Furstenberg, Marisa Berenson, Daniel Boulud, Roseanna Arquette, Tony Parker, and Richard Meier. Some blank questionnaires ae also included at the end, making this book an ideal gifr.

Download or read book Proustian Uncertainties written by Saul Friedländer and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian revisits Marcel Proust’s masterpiece in this essay on literature and memory, exploring the question of identity—that of the novel’s narrator and Proust’s own. This engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time considers how the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of commonality and divergence. We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does this reflect the author’s position, and how does the narrator handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? These are major questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the author’s life doesn’t give obvious answers. The narrator’s reflections on time, on death, on memory, and on love are as many paths leading to the image of self that he projects. In Proustian Uncertainties, Saul Friedländer draws on his personal experience from a life spent investigating the ties between history and memory to offer a fresh perspective on the seminal work.

Download or read book How Proust Can Change Your Life written by Alain de Botton and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘What a marvellous book this is . . . de Botton dissects what [Proust] had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive and adds his own delicious commentary. The result is an intoxicating as it is wise, amusing as well as stimulating, and presented in so fresh a fashion as to be unique . . . I could not stop, and now much start all over again.’ Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday ‘De Botton not only has a complete understanding of Proust’s life . . . but what is particularly charming about this small, readable book is its tongue-in-cheek benignity, its lightly held erudition and its generous way of lending itself to what is not only the greatest book of the century but also the darkest and the most eccentric’ Edmund White, Observer ‘It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction . . . de Botton, in emphasizing Proust’s healing, advisory aspects, does us the service of rereading him on our behalf, providing of that vast sacred lake a sweet and lucid distillation.’ John Updike, New Yorker ‘De Botton’s little book is so charming, amusing and sensible that it may even itself change your life.’ Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph ‘This engaging book is one of the most entertaining pieces of literary criticism I have read in a long while.’ Sunday Telegraph ‘A very enjoyable book’ Sebastian Faulks

Download or read book Proust's Lesbianism written by Elisabeth Ladenson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.