Postmodern Proust

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern, or Why Style Matters argues against the traditional view that Marcel Proust wrote pastiches, that is, texts that imitate the style of another author, to master his literary predecessors while sharpening his writerly quill. On the contrary, James F. Austin demonstrates that Proust’s oeuvre, and In Search of Lost Time in particular, deploy pastiche to other ends: Proust’s pastiches, in fact, “do things with words” to create powerful real-world effects. His works are indeed performative acts that forge social relationships, redefine our ideas of literature, and even work against oppressive political and economic discourses. Building on the “speech-act” theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller, and on the postmodern theory of Fredric Jameson, this book not only elucidates the performative nature of pastiche, but also shows that the famous “Goncourt” pastiche from In Search of Lost Time has attracted so much attention because it already attained the postmodern; that is, it eliminated temporal depth and experience, transforming time itself into a nostalgic style of an era, and into the sort of aestheticized surface that came to define postmodernism decades later. To reflect this transformation of pastiche, this work rearticulates its history in France around Proust. Reconfiguring a scholastic, classically-inspired pedagogical tradition based on imitation, and breaking with the dominant satirical practice, Proust’s work opened up possibilities in the twentieth century for a new kind of pastiche: playful and performative in the literary field, and postmodern in a French cinema that, as with the Goncourt pastiche, represents time as the visual style of an era, whether unreflexively in “heritage” films such as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, or discerningly in Eric Rohmer’s Lady and the Duke, which uses period pictorial and painterly conventions to illustrate how the representation of history onscreen typically flattens time into style.

In Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel Andrew Gibson sets out to demonstrate that postmodern theory has actually made possible an ethical discourse around fiction. Each chapter elaborates and discusses a particular aspect of Levinas' thought and raises questions for that thought and its bearing on the novel. It also contains detailed analyses of particular texts. Part of the book's originality is its concentration on a range of modernist and postmodern novels which have seldom if ever served as the basis for a larger ethical theory of fiction. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel discusses among others the writings of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust and Salman Rushdie.

This a comprehensive comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century's most important writers of prose. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and close readings of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, James H. Reid compares the two novelists' use of first-person narration in constructing and demystifying fictions of consciousness. Reid focuses on the narrator's search to represent the voice that speaks the novel, a search, he argues, that structures first-person narration in the works of both novelists. He examines in detail the significant impact of Proust's writing on Beckett's own work as well as Beckett's subtle reworkings of Proust's themes and strategies. This study is an important contribution to critical literature, and offers fresh perspectives on the crucial importance of the Recherche and the trilogy in the context of the twentieth-century novel.

The original version of Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context strove to show how a kindred encyclopedic drive and sacramental sense informed their responses to the epochal trauma, yielding three distinct and monumental visions of the human estate by the 1920s.

"Craig begins by attributing the early introduction of the Recherche to the intimate friendship between Proust and the pianist-composer Reynaldo Halm, who was born in Caracas. He then shows in chapter 1 how literary critics of the principal newspapers and literary magazines of such countries as Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile examined this French text, which we know today as one of the fundamental works of modernism. Shortly thereafter interest in the Recherche spread to Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, and Colombia. Eventually it would be read in all parts of the New World. Over the years Spanish Americans have continued to write about the Recherche and have published several noteworthy books on it, which are included in the comprehensive bibliography which serves as an appendix."--BOOK JACKET.