Proust And The Visual

This collection of essays is aiming at capturing the rich and complex category of the 'visual' both in Proust's novel itself (in its philosophical and stylistic implications) and beyond it, in other visual practices (cinema, painting, dance) inspired by the novel.

"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.

Proust and the Visual is an edited volume of essays written by Proustian specialists, concerned with a rich phenomenological category, the “visual” whose prominent role in the novel is at the heart of its modernity. The “visual” is defined as manifesting in the image not only space, but also time. The “visual” is considered as a category that delineates the conditions of possibility of all visibility and constitutes an integral part of both the progression of the narrator’s journey towards becoming a writer and of the unfolding of the novel itself.

Chardin and Rembrandt is an unfinished essay written around 1895 by Marcel Proust. Oft overlooked in Prousts illustrious writing career, this book is a newly translated version by David Zwirner Books as one of the first two entries in its ekphrasis series. This essay is a literary experiment in which an unnamed narrator gives advice to a young man suffering from melancholy, taking him on an imaginary tour through the Louvre where his readings of Chardin imbue the everyday world with new meaning, and his ruminations on Rembrandt take his melancholic pupil beyond the realm of mere objects.

Marcel Proust offered the twentieth century a new psychology of memory and seeing. His novel In Search of Lost Time was written in the modern age of photography and art history. In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography is an intellectual adventure that brings to light Proust’s visual imagination, his visual metaphors, and his photographic resources and imaginings. The book features over 90 illustrations. Mary Bergstein highlights various kinds of photography: daguerreotypes, stereoscopic cards, cartes-de-visite, postcards, book illustrations, and other photographic mediums. Portraiture, medical photography, spirit photography, architectural photography, Orientalism, ethnographic photography, and fin-de-siècle studies of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Vermeer, are considered in terms of Proust’s life and work. The net is cast wide, and each image under discussion has been researched with subtle attention to art, literature, and cultural history. This scholarly study in literature and visual culture will be a delight, too, for general readers who love photography or Proust. Mary Bergstein is professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She won the 2012 “Courage to Dream” book prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association for, Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell 2010). She has published numerous books and articles on art and visual culture from Italian Renaissance sculpture to contemporary photography.

“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.

Beginning with the remarkable essay "Contre Saint-Beuve," this surprising and stimulating critical collection presents Proust's views on the contemporary writing of his era, on painting and painters, and on such literary masters of the nineteenth century as Tolstoy, Goethe, and Stendhal.