Marcel Proust And The Creative Encounter

A collection of essays written by various scholars critically analyzing the life and works of French author Marcel Proust. Includes analyses of characters, themes, and symbolism in Proust's major works. Also contains an annotated bibliography that can be used for finding further information.

This study examines Marcel Proust’s works and his readers, starting of with the reading encounter one needs in order not to miss out on things, and ending by exploring the nature of Proust’s vision. An interesting study for everyone who wants to know more about Proust and his ideas.

This study confronts Proust's underlying search to explain through literature the meaning of the human self. It deals with Proust's creative silence from an aesthetic-philosophical point of view by comparing him with Merleau-Ponty, Claudel, Braque, Marcel, St. Bonaventure, and St. Augustine.

This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tribute to those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.

The Gardens of Desire is at once a model of literary interpretation and a groundbreaking psychocritical reading of a literary masterpiece, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Shedding new light on the origins of the creative impulse in general, and on the psychological origins of the Recherche in particular, the book illuminates the hidden associations between matricidal, suicidal, sadistic, masochistic, homoerotic, and creative impulses as manifested in Proust's work. The book moves beyond traditional Freudian readings of Proust to consider the theories of Otto Rank, Jacques Derrida, and others, and provides provocative readings of the "privileged moments" that comprise many of the work's "critical cruxes," as well as a thought-provoking rereading of the novel's ending. Both elegant and accessible, this book boldly explores the violence of desire as it relates not only to Proust's narrator, but also to Proustian criticism itself, with its own violent desire to appropriate the essence of Proust's masterpiece.

The first edition of Place and Experience established Jeff Malpas as one of the leading philosophers and thinkers of place and space and provided a creative and refreshing alternative to prevailing post-structuralist and postmodern theories of place. It is a foundational and ground-breaking book in its attempt to lay out a sustained and rigorous account of place and its significance. The main argument of Place and Experience has three strands: first, that human being is inextricably bound to place; second, that place encompasses subjectivity and objectivity, being reducible to neither but foundational to both; and third that place, which is distinct from, but also related to space and time, is methodologically and ontologically fundamental. The development of this argument involves considerations concerning the nature of place and its relation to space and time; the character of that mode of philosophical investigation that is oriented to place and that is referred to as ‘philosophical topography’; the nature of subjectivity and objectivity as inter-related concepts that also connect with intersubjectivity; and the way place is tied to memory, identity, and the self. Malpas draws on a rich array of writers and philosophers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Proust, Heidegger and Donald Davidson. This second edition is revised throughout, including a new chapter on place and technological modernity, especially the seeming loss of place in the contemporary world, and a new Foreword by Edward Casey. It also includes a new set of additional features, such as illustrations, annotated further reading, and a glossary, which make this second edition more useful to teachers and students alike.