"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.
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.
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher is the first book to properly explore Proust from a philosophical angle and argues that the key to understanding Proust is the concept of experience.
From the author of the acclaimed Queen of Fashion--a brilliant look at the glittering world of turn-of-the-century Paris through the first in-depth study of the three women Proust used to create his supreme fictional character, the Duchesse de Guermantes. Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe--these were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber says, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style." All well but unhappily married, these women sought freedom and fulfillment by reinventing themselves, between the 1870s and 1890s, as icons. At their fabled salons, they inspired the creativity of several generations of writers, visual artists, composers, designers, and journalists. Against a rich historical backdrop, Weber takes the reader into these women's daily lives of masked balls, hunts, dinners, court visits, nights at the opera or theater. But we see as well the loneliness, rigid social rules, and loveless, arranged marriages that constricted these women's lives. Proust, as a twenty-year-old law student in 1892, would worship them from afar, and later meet them and create his celebrated composite character for The Remembrance of Things Past.
Proust and the Arts brings together expert Proustians and renowned interdisciplinary scholars in a major reconsideration of the novelist's relation to the arts. Going beyond the classic question of the models used by Proust for his fictional artists, the essays collected here explore how he learned from and integrated, in highly personal ways, the work of such creators as Wagner or Carpaccio. This volume reveals the breadth of Proust's engagement with varied art forms from different eras: from "primitive" arts to sound recordings, from medieval sculpture to Art Nouveau glassmaking, and from portrait photography to the private art of doodling. Chapters bring into focus issues of perception and detail in examining how Proust encountered and responded to works of art, and attend to the ways art shaped his complex relationship to identity, sexuality, humor, and the craft of writing.
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.
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.
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.
A Publisher's Weekly Most Anticipated Book of 2022 Living and Dying with Marcel Proust is the result of a lifetime's reading of, reflection on, and love for Proust's masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century fiction, Proust's In Search of Lost Time describes a unique journey, combining elements drawn from the timeless narratives of great expectations and lost illusions. In this lively and entertaining book, Christopher Prendergast traces that journey as it unfolds on an arc defined by the polarities in his title: living and dying. At once a careful contemplation Proust's masterwork and an exploration of the rich sensory and impressionistic tapestry of a lived world, Living and Dying with Marcel Proust addresses such disparate Proustian obsessions as insomnia, food, digestion, color, addiction, memory, breath and breathing, breasts, snobbism, music, and humor. Entertaining and erudite, Prendergast's book will surely become the companion for all readers either about to reembark on Proust's three-million-word journey or setting out for the first time.