Read complete books and articles on: Marcel Proust

Proust, Marcel - märsĕlˈ, 1871–1922, French novelist, b. Paris. He is one of the great literary figures of the modern age. Born to wealthy bourgeois parents, he suffered delicate health as a child and was carefully ministered to by his mother. As a young man he ambitiously mingled in high Parisian society and wrote his rather unpromising first work, Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896; tr. Pleasures and Regrets, 1948; new tr. Pleasures and Days, 1957). Troubled by asthma and neuroses, as well as by the deaths of his parents, he increasingly withdrew from external life and after 1907 lived mainly in a cork-lined room, working at night on his monumental cyclic novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (16 vol., 1913–27; tr. Remembrance of Things Past, 1922–32, rev. tr. In Search of Lost Time, 1992; new tr. 2002).

The first of the novel cycle, Du côté de chez Swann (1913, tr. Swann's Way, 1928) went unnoticed, but the second, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919, tr. Within a Budding Grove, 1919), was awarded the Goncourt Prize. Proust's semiautobiographical novel cycle is superficially concerned with its hero's development through childhood and through youthful love affairs to the point of commitment to literary endeavor. It is less a story than an interior monologue. Discursive, but alive with brilliant metaphor and sense imagery, the work is rich in psychological, philosophical, and sociological understanding. A vital theme is the link between external and internal reality found in time and memory, to which Proust sees humanity's strivings subjugated—time mocks the individual's intelligence and endeavors; memory synthesizes yet distorts past experience. Most experience causes inner pain, and the objects of human desires are the chief causes of their suffering.

In Proust's scheme the individual is isolated, society is false and ruled by snobbery, and artistic endeavor is raised to a religion and is superior to nature. Only through the vision gained in works of art can the individual see beyond his or her subjective experience. Proust's ability to interpret innermost experience in terms of such eternal forces as time and death created a profound and protean world view and his work has influenced generations of novelists and thinkers. His vision and technique have come to be seen as vital to the development of modernism. Most of his correspondence has been published (21 vol., P. Kolb, ed., 1970–93), as has his draft of an early novel, Jean Santeuil (1952, tr. 1955), and Contre Sainte-Beuve (1954, tr. On Art and Literature, 1896–1919, 1958).

See biographies by A. Maurois (1950, repr. 1984), R. H. Barker (1958), G. D. Painter (2 vol., 1959–65), L. Bersani (1965), G. Brée (1966), R. Hayman (1990), J.-Y. Tadié (1996, tr. 2000), E. White (1998), and W. C. Carter (2000); studies by W. S. Bell (1962), P. Quennell (1971), S. L. Wolitz (1971), G. Deleuze (1972), J. M. Cocking (1982), B. J. Bucknall, ed. (1987), L. Hodgon (1989), A. Compagnon (1992), J. Kristeva (1996), and R. Shattuck (2000).

Show Excerpt Only

15 of the Best Books and Articles on: Marcel Proust

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Marcel Proust: A Biography » Read Now
by Richard H. Barker. 373 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...MARCEL PROUST A Biography MARCEL PROUST A BIOGRAPHY BY Richard H. Barker CRITERION BOOKS...NRF , from Lucien Daudets Autour de soixante lettres de Marcel Proust , from...
2.

Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage » Read Now
by Leighton Hodson. 422 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

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.
3.

The Writings of the Young Marcel Proust (1885-1900): An Ideological Critique » Read Now
by Frank Rosengarten. 266 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
4.

Around Proust » Read Now
by Richard E. Goodkin. 162 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
5.

Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust » Read Now
by Joshua Landy. 255 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
6.

Fiction Refracts Science: Modernist Writers from Proust to Borges » Read Now
by Allen Thiher. 298 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
7.

Fiction Rivals Science: The French Novel from Balzac to Proust » Read Now
by Allen Thiher. 226 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In Fiction Rivals Science, Allen Thiher describes the epistemic rivalry that the major nineteenth-century French novelists felt in dealing with science. After brief considerations of Stendhal, Thiher focuses on the four most important "realist" novelists in France: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and, going...
Read More

In Fiction Rivals Science, Allen Thiher describes the epistemic rivalry that the major nineteenth-century French novelists felt in dealing with science. After brief considerations of Stendhal, Thiher focuses on the four most important "realist" novelists in France: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and, going into the twentieth century, Proust. According to Thiher, each of these novelists considered himself to be in competition with science to make the novel an instrument for knowledge.
The first chapter sets forth the understanding of science that dominated the early nineteenth century in order to make it plausible that literary minds, throughout the nineteenth century, thought that they could not only rival science, but even make positive contributions to knowledge. The Newtonian paradigm that had dominated the Enlightenment was slowly being challenged by new developments both in physics and in nonphysical sciences such as biology. Especially in biology the development of a scientific discourse using narrative temporality favored the idea that novelists could also use fiction to construct discourses that advanced knowledge.
Balzac wanted to construct a natural history of society and correct the chemical theory of his time. Flaubert drew upon medicine and physiology for the rhetoric of his realist fiction. Zola used unsuccessful medical paradigms for his doctrine of heredity, and models drawn from thermodynamics to describe the relation of the individual to societal forces. Finally, Proust drew upon thinkers such as Poincare to elaborate an epistemology that put an end to the rivalry novelists might feel with scientists. Proust located certain knowledge within the realm of human subjectivitywhile granting the power of laws to rule over the contingent realm of physical reality, in which, after Poincare, neither mathematics nor Newton was any longer a source of absolute certainty. Proust's novel is thus the last
Show less
8.

Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarme, Proust, Joyce, Beckett » Read Now
by Adam Piette. 294 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In this book Adam Piette establishes fascinating new links between sound effects and the representation of memory in literary texts. He sets out a workable taxonomy of sound-repetitions in prose and formulates, through a theory of alerting-devices, the ways in which the reader's attention is drawn...
Read More

In this book Adam Piette establishes fascinating new links between sound effects and the representation of memory in literary texts. He sets out a workable taxonomy of sound-repetitions in prose and formulates, through a theory of alerting-devices, the ways in which the reader's attention is drawn to the acoustic surface of the text. Piette scrutinizes Mallarme's prose-poetry, Proust's musical syntax, Joyce's memory-rhymes (from the Portrait of the Artist through Ulysses to Finnegans Wake), and Beckett's prose and drama, demonstrating that sound effects act as intricate reminders of memory-traces in the text. Despite how widely the four writers diverge in their representations of memory, Piette shows that the use of this memory-rhyme technique is common to them all.
Show less
9.

Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Chap. 3 "Marcel Proust") » Read Now
by Jessica Berman. 242 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In this book, Jessica Berman claims that modernist fiction engages directly with early twentieth-century transformations of community and cosmopolitanism. Although modernist writers develop radically different models for social organization, their writings return again and again to issues of...
Read More

In this book, Jessica Berman claims that modernist fiction engages directly with early twentieth-century transformations of community and cosmopolitanism. Although modernist writers develop radically different models for social organization, their writings return again and again to issues of commonality and shared voice, particularly in relation to dominant discourses of gender and nationality. The writings of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein not only inscribe early twentieth-century anxieties about race, ethnicity, nationality and gender, but confront them with demands for modern, cosmopolitan versions of community.
Show less
10.

Proust, the Body and Literary Form » Read Now
by Michael R. Finn. 210 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Michael Finn examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in France in the late nineteenth century, and compares Proust's anxieties about writing In Search of Lost Time to the concerns of earlier writers suffering from nervous conditions, including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt...
Read More

Michael Finn examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in France in the late nineteenth century, and compares Proust's anxieties about writing In Search of Lost Time to the concerns of earlier writers suffering from nervous conditions, including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Once Proust cast off his fear of being a nervous weakling, he was able to make fun of the supposed purity of the novel form. The author shows how hysteria becomes a key to Proustian narrative, and discusses how together with Proust's use of pastiche, narrative pranks and games, it unlocks a writing technique that undermines conventional fiction.
Show less
11.

Neurosis and Narrative: The Decadent Short Fiction of Proust, Lorrain, and Rachilde » Read Now
by Renee A. Kingcaid. 212 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...movement -- France. 4. Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922 -- Knowledge...In the fall of 1893, Marcels future was under heated discussion in the Proust household. Proust...
12.

Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust » Read Now
by Colleen Lamos. 269 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This original study reevaluates central texts of the modernist canon--Eliot's early poetry including The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past--by examining sexual energies and identifications in them that are typically regarded as perverse. Colleen Lamos' analysis of...
Read More

This original study reevaluates central texts of the modernist canon--Eliot's early poetry including The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past--by examining sexual energies and identifications in them that are typically regarded as perverse. Colleen Lamos' analysis of the operations of gender and sexuality in these texts reveals conflicts, concerning the definition of masculine heterosexuality, which cut across the aesthetics of modernism. What emerges is a reconsideration of modernist literature as a whole, gender categories, and the relation between errant sexuality and literary "mistakes."
Show less
13.

Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous » Read Now
by Emma Wilson. 212 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Can fictions of desire determine real pleasures? Do texts regulate the performance of our sexual identities? In Sexuality and the Reading Encounter, Emma Wilson offers a new account of the intimate relations between reading, identity, and identification. Interweaving theoretical debate with analysis...
Read More

Can fictions of desire determine real pleasures? Do texts regulate the performance of our sexual identities? In Sexuality and the Reading Encounter, Emma Wilson offers a new account of the intimate relations between reading, identity, and identification. Interweaving theoretical debate with analysis of texts by Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous, her study reveals the formative potential and transferential pleasures of the reading encounter.
Show less
14.

Proust, Beckett and Narration » Read Now
by James H. Reid. 195 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century's most important writers of prose combines theoretical analysis and text study of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone dies, and The Unnamable. James Reid's study is an...
Read More

This comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century's most important writers of prose combines theoretical analysis and text study of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone dies, and The Unnamable. James Reid's study is an important contribution to the critical literature, and offers fresh perspectives on the crucial significance of the Recherche and the trilogy in the context of the twentieth-century novel.
Show less
15.

Marcel Proust and Spanish America: From Critical Response to Narrative Dialogue » Read Now
by Herbert E. Craig. 443 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library