La Recherche Du Temps Perdu

The importance of vision and visual arts such as painting, theatre, and sculpture in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu has long been affirmed; another significant system of visual representation in the novel is photography. Proust appropriated photography as a practice with its own distinctive characteristics which could inform his writing about the processes of perception and memory. Through close textual analysis of scenes where photography is experienced or observed as a practice, and scenes where photography is written into the body of the text, Aine Larkin offers an invigorating new study that sheds genuinely new light on the presence of photographic motifs in Proust's novel, and the subtlety of Proust's engagement with this modern imaging system in his work.

In Proust and Emotion, Inge Crosman Wimmers proposes a new approach to A la recherche du temps perdu that 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published in the new Pléiade edition of the novel, the Mauriac edition of Albertine disparue, and material from the unpublished Proust manuscripts - all of which shed further light on the importance of affect in A la recherche. Proust and Emotion will 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.

A turbulent affair plays out in the pilgrim city of Lourdes 'Carries you through with humour, warmth and, above all, the urgency of a great romance' Guardian 'Closing this novel after reading the last page, one briefly believes in miracles, at least of the human redemptive kind' Independent on Sunday 'Jubilate is something to celebrate indeed' Independent A woman wakes in a Lourdes hotel room beside her lover of just two days. She has brought her brain-damaged husband on a pilgrimage to seek a miracle cure; her lover is making a TV documentary to mark the shrine's 150th anniversary year. Setting aside personal doubts, family ties and spiritual differences, they embark on a turbulent affair from which neither they nor those around them will emerge unchanged.

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)

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.

"Eric Karpele's guide offers a feast for the eyes as it celebrates the close relationship between the visual and literary arts in Proust's masterpiece, Karpeles has identified and located all of the paintings to which Proust makes exact reference. Where only a painter's name is mentioned to indicate a certain mood or appearance, he has chosen a representative work to illustrate the impression that Proust sought to evoke. Botticelli's angels, Manet's courtesans, Mantegna's warriors and Carpaccio's saints stand among Monet's water lilies and Piranesi's engravings of Rome, while Karpeles's insightful essay and lucid contextual commentary explain their significance to Proust. Extensive notes and a comprehensive index of all painters and paintings mentioned in the novel provide an invaluable resource for the reader navigating In Search of Lost Time for the first time or the fifth."--BOOK JACKET.