The Strange M Proust

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.

This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27) changed the course of modern narrative fiction. This Introduction provides an account of Proust's life, the socio-historical and cultural contexts of his work and an assessment of his early works. At its core is a volume-by-volume study of In Search of Lost Time, which attends to its remarkable superstructure, as well as to individual images and the intricacies of Proust's finely-stitched prose. The book reaches beyond stale commonplaces of madeleines and memory, alerting readers to Proust's verbal virtuosity, his preoccupations with the fleeting and the unforeseeable, with desire, jealousy and the nature of reality. Lively, informative chapters on Proust criticism and the work's afterlives in contemporary culture provide a multitude of paths to follow. The book charges readers with the energy and confidence to move beyond anecdote and hearsay and to read Proust's novel for themselves.

A witty, refreshing, and fun book on the experience of reading Marcel Proust. What would the world be like without this work, where would we be if it hadn't happened? This is how Michael Wood found himself writing about Proust's work as an event and about events in relation to that work itself. The event that created the figure we know as Proust did not take a whole lifetime, we can date it to within certain months, perhaps certain weeks, of a certain year, 1908. That was when Proust the interesting occasional writer and full-time socialite, turned into an ostensible hermit and a real novelist. This short book says something about the event as a lifetime affair, and shows what the sudden change of 1908 looks like. It explores the work of Marcel Proust as an event in the world, something that happened to literature and culture and our understanding of history. This event has more aspects than we can count, but this book offers detailed critical snapshots of seven of them: the birth of Proust as a novelist; what he teaches us about the mythology of beginnings; about metaphor as a kind of rebellion; about love as a permanent anxiety attack; about the Dreyfus Affair; about the concept of justice; about the mythology of endings.

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.

In the years since Proust's death there have been many specialized studies of his extraordinary novel, and his character and viewpoint have been violently attacked and warmly defended. Here at last, written with sound scholarship but addressed to the general reader, is a full, frank, and unbiased account of the man and his work, and a clear statement of what he has to say to the world today. Chronological biography is interpolated with detailed analysis of Proust's work in reference to his intellectual and emotional development. Stressed as important contributing factors in his development, aside from the influences of the decadent '8Os and '90s, are the subordination of intellect to intuition, the discovery of involuntary memory, the search for affection and the enduring friendship, the torments of jealousy in a sensitive mind, the burden of homosexuality. The author shows how the dreamy, sensitive, affectionate boy who loved sunlight and the out-­of-doors was transformed into the legendary recluse of the cork-lined chamber—a strange, somnambulistic creature with luminous eyes, waxy pallor, and dank matted hair who, shivering and drugged, had himself driven in a tightly dosed limousine for a look through glass at his still-loved fruit trees in bloom. It was asthma that accomplished the transformation—asthma and the strange paralysis of the will when he was called upon to make a decision. But in his enforced seclusion Proust's profoundly analytical mind, extraordinary intuitions, and astounding memory explored the fruits of experience, and produced his epoch-making work. Out of his physical and emotional sufferings he evolved his philosophy of the two worlds: one the world of time, where necessity, illusion, suffering, change, decay, and death are the law; the other the world of eternity, where there is freedom, beauty, and peace. Normal experience is in the world of time, but glimpses of the other world may be given in moments of contemplation or through accidents of involuntary memory. It is the function of art to develop these insights and to use them for the illumination of life in the world of time.

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.

Presents a study of the final days of the seminal author and discusses his upbringing, themes in his works, his rise as a famous writer, and the final months before his death.