Prousts Binoculars

In this compact volume readers just beginning Proust's master work and those who are already enriched by it will become aware of a significance not unkown but only forgotten"--the basic structure of Proust's enormous novel. The overall meaning of Proust's book lies in his three ways of looking at the world--cinematographic, montage, and stereoscopic--and their varying effects on the emotions and the intellect. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Shattuck leaves us not only with a deepened appreciation of Proust's great work but of all great literature as well."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times For any reader who has been humbled by the language, the density, or the sheer weight of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Roger Shattuck is a godsend. Winner of the National Book Award for Marcel Proust, a sweeping examination of Proust's life and works, Shattuck now offers a useful and eminently readable guidebook to Proust's epic masterpiece, and a contemplation of memory and consciousness throughout great literature. Here, Shattuck laments Proust's defenselessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, and presents Proust as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched only by his irrepressible comic sense. Proust's Way, the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, will serve as the next generation's guide to one of the world's finest writers of fiction.

This study of Marcel Proust's creative imagination examines an aspect of the novel that has hitherto been largely overlooked: the author's dependence on secondary visual sources. Gabrielle Townsend argues that reproductions play a key role in the work's complex, multi-layered structure.

Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is a hybrid, a novel-essay, a capacious work of fiction containing a commonplace-book. It might, as Roland Barthes has suggested, be thought of as the product of profound and cherished indecision, Proust's indecision between two styles of writing, themoralistic and the fictive/novelistic/romanesque. Structure and Science is an exploration of this indecision.The shorter Proust, Proust the moraliste, is a prolific writer of maxims, from the laws of the passions to the aesthetic manifesto of the Temps retrouve to the [?rapacious] teeming/fertile/spawning/exuberant/luxuriant reflection(s) on sexuality, politics, society. Yet these maxims, whose grammarlays claim to timelessness, are bound up in narrative, the story of their evolution. And disintegration. Proust's moralizing exposes our affective relationship with law statements, with authority, and it is this question that engages A la recherche in an epistemological debate which crosses theboundaries between the two cultures, art and science. What might be called the epistemological alertness of Proust's text is explored at this interface between 'modernist' science and literature.

This wide-ranging volume of essays provides an illuminating set of approaches to the multifaceted contexts of Proust's life and work.

Originally published in 1981 and now reissued with a new preface by Randolph Splitter, this volume examines Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, showing that Marcel, the central character, like the novel itself, is characterized by an unstable equilibrium of opposing forces, so that he wishes both to dissolve the boundaries between inner and outer worlds, and to maintain divisions and defenses. Instead of trying to force the text into a rigid theoretical structure this reading of Proust’s novel illuminates it by confronting and re-examining the problems that Freudian theory itself addresses. In considering these problems, the author also takes into account the findings of modern French psychoanalysis and literary criticism, referring particularly to the work of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida.

Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust investigates human curiosity and its representation in eavesdropping scenes in nineteenth-century English and French novels. Ann Gaylin argues that eavesdropping dramatizes a primal human urge to know and offers a paradigm of narrative transmission and reception of information among characters, narrators and readers. Gaylin sheds light on the social and psychological effects of the nineteenth-century rise of information technology and accelerated flow of information, as manifested in the anxieties about - and delight in - displays of private life and its secrets. Analysing eavesdropping in Austen, Balzac, Collins, Dickens and Proust, Gaylin demonstrates the flexibility of the scene to produce narrative complication or resolution; to foreground questions of gender and narrative agency; to place the debates of privacy and publicity within the literal and metaphoric spaces of the nineteenth-century novel. This 2003 study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century English and European literature.

This volume seeks to offer a new way of reading A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, using a fluid manner of interpretation which suggests process rather than product. This study contends that everything in Proust's work is threefold. The middle term is the common ground shared by the two terms of comparison that constitute a metaphor.