Proust At The Movies

Film established itself as an artistic form of expression at the same time that Proust started work on his masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu. If Proust apparently took little interest in what he described as a poor avatar of reductive, mimetic representation, the resonances between his own radical reworking of writing styles and the novelistic forms, and cinema as the art of time are undeniable. Proust at the Movies is the first study in English to consider these rich interconnections. Its introductory chapter charts the missed encounter between Proust and the cinema and addresses the problems inherent in adapting his novel to the screen. The following chapters examine the various cinematic responses to A la recherche du temps perdu attempted to date: Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey's failed attempts at adapting the whole of the novel in the 1970s, Volker Schlöndorff's Un Amour de Swann (1984), Raoul Ruiz's Le Temps retrouvé (1999), Chantal Akerman's La Prisonnière in La Captive (2000), and Fabio Carpi's Quartetto Basileus (1982) and Le Intermittenze del cuore (2003). The last chapter tracks the echoes of Proust's writing in the work of various directors, from Abel Grace to Jean-Luc Godard. The approach is multidisciplinary, combining literary criticism with film theory and elements of philosophy of art. Special attention is given to the modernist legacy in literature and film with its distinctive aesthetic and narrative features. An outline of the history and recent evolution of contemporary art cinema thus emerges: a cinema where the themes at the heart of Proust's work - memory, time, perception - are ceaselessly explored.

The strange M. Proust - the narrator, the author, and the embodiment of A la Recherche du Temps perdu - is now so canonical a writer that his very strangeness is easily overlooked. His book made of other books, his epic composed of extraordinary miniatures, his orderly structure where every law is subverted, his chronology where time can be undone and his geography where places can superimpose: in these, and many other ways, Proust continues to astonish even readers who have engaged with him for their entire careers. In this book, arising from the Princeton symposium of 2006, major critics come together to offer provocative readings of a work which is at the same time classical and unusual, French and foreign, familiar and strange. The book is dedicated to the memory of Malcolm Bowie (1943-2007), whose keynote address was one of his last major lectures. Other contributors include David Ellison, Anne Simon, Eugene Nicole, Joseph Brami, Raymonde Coudert, Christie McDonald, Michael Wood and Antoine Compagnon.

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.

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.

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.

The Art of the Text contributes to the fast-developing dialogue between textual studies and visual culture studies. It focuses on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually and, in essays by researchers in literature, screen and visual studies, the volume explores the visuality of the literary and non-literary text, with a sustained focus on French material of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here not as a state, but as a set of processes of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. By reading visually, the contributors here reactivate the visual-textual relations of canonical texts – from Romanticism to Naturalism, Surrealism to high Modernism; from film to fan literature, television to picture language.

This volume sets Marcel Proust's masterwork, Á la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27), in its cultural and socio-historical contexts. Essays by the leading scholars in the field attend to Proust's biography, his huge correspondence, and the genesis and protracted evolution of his masterpiece. Light is cast on Proust's relation to thinkers and artists of his time, and to those of the great French and European traditions of which he is now so centrally a part. There is vivid exploration of Proust's reading; his attitudes towards contemporary social and political issues; his relation to journalism, religion, sexuality, science and travel, and how these figure in the Recherche. The volume closes with a comprehensive survey of Proust's critical reception, from reviews during his lifetime to the present day, including assessments of Proust in translation and the broader assimilation of his work into twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture.