Marcel Proust Research Articles

Teoretycy literatury i nazwy własne (uwagi wstępne)

The article expands and modifies the contexts in which literary onomastics currently operates. This strictly interdisciplinary field of research, primarily originating from linguistics, has sought out the contexts that triggered non-obvious meanings of names readable in the artistic work from the outset. The references were varied – stylistics, textology, philosophy, structural poetics. All of them significantly enriched onomastic nalyses, leaving some fundamental sense of insufficiency at the same time. That is the reason why we propose the project of the connection between literary onomastics and — now extremely extensive — theoretical thought. The article is not the end of this discussion, but rather an exploratory study and the beginning of scientific research. Consequently, there is no one ordering and chronological concept with a clear conclusion, but the main aim is to show the analysis of the claims relevant for further research. Therefore, several concepts of theoreticians interested in proper names in literature were discussed (far from a common phenomenon in this case). From the research projects analyzed, including among others: U. Eco, J.F. Lyo tard, P. de Man, there emerges a clear conviction of the need to end the search for a referential, texted name. In this place it refers, on the one hand, to itself, establishing its own unreal meaning (image-forming, phonic, intertextual); on the other, it concerns the author’s system of naming (and beyond), which is also an epistemological concept. The starting point of these diagnoses was the thoroughly interpreted self-analysis of artistic works made by Marcel Proust; for further analysis, the thesis of Walter Benn Michaels was also employed, which brings interest in proper names from literature to the domain of artistic experiences. The conducted analysis (designing future literary onomastic research) leads to the final conclusion that the proper name indicates the essence itself, the arche of our existence.

Merleau-Ponty’s Melancholy

I offer a re-evaluation of Freudian melancholy by reading it in-conjunction with Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of phantom limbs and Marcel Proust’s involuntary memories. As an affective response to loss, melancholy bears a strange, belated temporality (Nachträglichkeit). Through Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the phantom limb, I emphasize that the melancholic subject remains affectively bound to a past world. While this can be read as problematic insofar as the subject is attuned to both the possibilities that belong to the present and the impossibilities that belong to the past world, I turn to Proust whose writings on involuntary memory indicate a way of taking up these futural (im)possibilities. I focus the discussion on the narrator’s involuntary memory of his grandmother after her death to highlight the creative transformation of his melancholy.

Caribbean Winter by Paul Morand Mary Gallagher

 Reviews addition, it determines the ways in which Ovid fashioned his narrative with a view to shaping and controlling later interpretation, also tracing critical developments in the practice of life writing. e second chapter examines the characterization of Ovid in a range of materials prefacing translations of his poetry. Much of this writing focuses on the stylistic features promoted by respective translators, and Taylor traces how, throughout the seventeenth century, the figure of Ovid grew increasingly synonymous with innovation. In the third chapter Taylor turns to the histoire galante, taking stock of fictional narratives of Ovid’s life to show how his love poetry earned him the especial attention of female authors; she also demonstrates that Ovid’s status as an exiled poet allowed writers, through the retelling and reimagining of his story, to question courtly power dynamics. Exile remains a prominent theme in the fourth chapter, where Taylor determines how the works of exiled authors éophile de Viau and Bussy-Rabutin draw parallels with tales of Ovid’s own life, with the ultimate aim of gaining the respect and validation of their readership. e final chapter analyses Pierre Bayle’s entry on Ovid in the , , and  editions of the Dictionnaire historique et critique. It discusses Bayle’s identification of the errors ubiquitous in previous narratives of Ovid’s life, leading finally to a perceptive assessment of contemporary thoughts on the distinction between fact and fiction, imagination and reality. Two key paradoxes are at the heart of each chapter. First, despite being a classical writer, Ovid became an increasingly crucial figure for negotiating questions of modernity; second, although Ovid’s work was employed to elevate court culture, his status as an exile pushed contemporary readers and writers to use his writings to evaluate and interrogate royal power. In this volume, Taylor establishes an innovative approach to understanding seventeenth-century literature and culture, testifying also to the utmost relevance of research into cultural ‘quarrels’, classical reception, and life writing: a true academic feat, and one which will surely long be appreciated by readers. S B’ H, O L R Caribbean Winter. By P M. Trans. and intro. by M G. Oxford: Signal. .  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Paul Morand has had to travel a long hard road to rehabilitation. e modernist Wunderkind launched by Marcel Proust seemed fatally compromised by his friendship with Pierre Laval and service as Vichy ambassador to Bucharest and Bern. However, at the third attempt, Morand finally became an Immortel, significantly in May , during the twilight of his nemesis, Charles de Gaulle. Posthumously, his stupendous output (over a hundred books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction) has been republished and reassessed. In his  preface to Morand’s New York (), Philippe Sollers described Morand as one of the three greatest French writers of the twentieth century, alongside Proust and another sulphurous contemporary, LouisFerdinand Céline. Morand has also made a return to English-language publishing, notably through Euan Cameron’s translations for Pushkin Press. However, as Mary MLR, .,   Gallagher argues in her introduction, the works chosen have been those oriented towards the Anglo-Saxon world. is justifies Gallagher’s translation of Hiver caraïbe,whichgivesusasenseofMorandasindefatigablecosmopolitanglobetrotter. First published in , Caribbean Winter remassages notes from two journeys to the Caribbean and America made two years before. With Morand we cross the Atlantic: ‘Flying fish. e ship slows down, inching forward in a gelatinous light that is occasionally broken by a dorsal flash of shark. e walls of my cabin creak like a stove over-filled with fuel’ (p. ). We land at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, and very soon may be made uncomfortable by Morand’s outlook: ‘It is quite obvious that all the Negroes here have the vote. ey are wearing the stony, hostile and malevolent expressions of people set to nurse their bad humour for another four years’ (p. ). ere follow Port of Spain, Venezuela, Curaçao, Haiti, Cuba, then a magnificent coda devoted to Mexico and southern California. In his elliptical and allusive style, Morand remarks on people, politics, landscape, literature, and art. Morand is obsessed with racial and national difference, and the Caribbean crucible is a perfect environment for him to explore. What haunts him is...

The "Hearing I": Sounding the "Conditio Humana" in Ingeborg Bachmann's Ein Geschäft mit Träumen

This essay examines the production of Ingeborg Bachmann's first literary radio drama, Ein Geschäft mit Träumen (1952), in light of the author's reflections on Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time (1922) by drawing on her analysis of Proust's work in her lecture "Das schreibende Ich" (1959). It proposes that the rich tapestry of perceptions, memory, and experience in her script for Ein Geschäft mit Träumen creates a "hearing I," that, like Proust's "writing I," engages the audience's sense perceptions and encourages their critical reflection. This intertextual and inter-medial reading of Bachmann's play sheds light on her unique understanding of the narrative capabilities of the radio. For Bachmann, the isolation of the acoustic sense in the radio drama offered new possibilities to reveal to the audience their existential blindness and to guide them toward truth or Erkenntnis, her vision for the work of art.

Eastern influences of the figure of Marcel Proust and precedents to a comparison between À la recherche du temps perdu and Buddhism

The present study looks for influences from the East in the figure of Marcel Proust. Specifically, from the philosophy that is born from the sermons of Siddhartha Gotama known worldwide as buddhism. After the publication of several articles by some commentators of À la recherche du temps perdu in which it is said that Proust and Buddha have common features, we wanted to focus on the life and work of Proust and to confirm whether the French writer was indeed influenced by these exotic truths and to culminate his work, like Buddha, in an Enlightenment. We will also bring together here the work of these Proustian commentators, since they have not previously been grouped together in a single investigation, just as their proposals on this subject have never been evaluated.

On Philosophical Themes in Marcel Proust’s Works

Marcel Proust’s works contain a lot of ideas consonant with the ideas that were actively discussed by philosophers of his time. Many philosophers focused on the issues of perception, memory, will, freedom, personal identity, etc., which constituted an important part of academic curriculum. Proust familiarized himself with the issues studying philosophy at the Lyceum (he was taught by Alphonse Darlu) and at the Sorbonne. In his novel In Search of Lost Time, Proust describes an existential experience of his character viewing these issues from a particular perspective, through the prism of the main character’s lifelong search of his calling. He gradually proceeds from philosophical psychology exploring the interaction of memories and impressions in a particular perception, to philosophy proper, to metaphysics aimed at understanding the truth, at going beyond time. The article traces some moments of this transition, shows that for Proust it is not just the work of memory that is important but the emphasis on those states of consciousness where the present and the past coincide, merge, and thereby we go beyond time, to eternity. The author analyzes some images and signs that accompanied the character of the novel on the way to the realization of his calling. Particular attention is paid to the Proustian interpretation of the role of art in changing and enriching the perception of the world, as well as the importance in human life of a habit in which positive and negative aspects are highlighted. Proust himself believed that a work of art is an optical instrument through which the readers begin to discern in themselves what they would otherwise fail to see. His own novel was such an instrument.

Darstellung der Wirklichkeit: Erich Auerbachs Konzept von Erinnerung

This article presents an analysis of Erich Auerbach’s concept of memory as a method of representing reality – as “recovery of lost realities in remembrance” – through Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse and Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Times (1913–1927). In the last chapter of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Auerbach demonstrates that use of a first-person narrator, an important characteristic of the modern novel, means at the same time a preoccupation with the literary depiction of memory. As a form of consciousness depiction, memory is “the memorizing consciousness,” comparable to the metaphor of a flash (Benjamin, 1977, p. 253) that enlightens the sub-conscious. Defining Proust’s literary depiction, called by Auerbach a “recovery of lost realities,” and by his friend Walter Benjamin “visualization” of memory, one recognizes an interesting analogy between Benjamin and Auerbach’s concepts of memory.

Literatur und Wahnsinn. Die Kunst der Problemstellung

AbstractLiterature and Madness. The Art of Posing a Problem. Literary studies and the history of science can collaborate in their ways of posing a problem, which is an art in itself. The article points to a problem that is posed by Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. What is the nexus between literature and madness and what makes their difference?

Vieillissement et oubli : contretemps de la (bonne) traduction (avec Walter Benjamin e Marcel Proust)

Abstract Starting from Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the work of Marcel Proust, we intend to go back to the way they allow us to think the relations between literature and translation, the “life connections” between them. We aim to speculate more specifically on the productive dimension of aging and oblivion taken as critical setbacks, that are natural to every work - original or translation-, and that predestine, necessarily and inexorably, within the “internal forest” of each of the languages involved and the border between them, to incompleteness and “continued life”.

Conversational dynamics in the ‘Roman d’Albertine’ (‘Albertine’s love story’) – Marcel Proust, <i>À la recherche du temps perdu</i> (<i>In search of lost time</i>)

À la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time), the famous novel sequence by the contemporary French writer Marcel Proust, weaves thousands of conversations between its characters, which often last through the years. In particular, as love speech implies a deep emotion, all its words are carefully kept in mind over time. The narrator, who pays the sharpest attention to all kinds of interaction between human beings, illustrates by means of many convincing side comments and inner speeches, how conversation works, not only in a single scene, but also from one scene to the next, throughout its history. And the stability and longevity of Proustian characters extend those conversational relationships to a good deal of the novel, so that it seems most interesting to analyse the concept of conversational history in such a massive corpus. Specifically, we shall pay attention to the historical conversation between the Narrator and his beloved Albertine, from both macro-discursive and micro-discursive dynamics, to get a deeper insight on its powerful narrative function in the love story.

DEAD WRITE

This article presents a reading of mourning in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu from the philosophical perspective of Jacques Derrida to imagine a relationship between death and literature. When he writes mourning, Proust works over an irreconcilable abyss – he writes the possibility of mourning, but never writes its completion. In fact, he dies before writing any completion; he dies in deferring it, opening up a mourning for his signature that he had already begun. This, I argue, underlines the aporia that Proust contends with in writing a subjectivity of mourning and death. Death in literature dissects the arresting spectral quality of literature itself – the disability to irrevocably absent its transversal representations, or the interminable coming-back of its ghosts. In composing a literary mourning, Proust dies into a work in which the separation of signatories (Proust, any one of his narrators, us as readers, and any one of those) blurs into an indistinguishable synecdoche. As such, the article resolves upon the consideration that Proust seemingly left his novel – when we create a fictive image of death, how can we imagine anything other than life? The literary dissemination of the signature, of every past self, presents, or imagines, absence as a dream of nothingness.

Narrative Twists: Spiraling Time and Projected Identities in the Hair of Vertigo’s Madeleine

This article explores the ways in which hair entwines memory, identity and character to establish multiple modes of consuming Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). As the female protagonist of Vertigo, the character of Madeleine Elster, with her recognizable, oft-cited icy white-blonde chignon, is a projected identity staged as fantasy. Threaded across a dizzying narrative, the twisted spiral of hair forms a lens for viewing and reading multiple identities, configurations, actions and endless interpretation. From Hitchcock’s misty, dreamy San Francisco to Vertigo’s origins as a Parisian detective novel, to Marcel Proust’s madeleine cake via the biblical Mary Magdalene by way of Kristevan literary analysis, and Chris Marker’s movie-homage, Madeleine’s hair is both portal and projection through which to fall into a complex sensory encounter that traces the moving image as transposed into written word.

Sense of doubt

When did you decide to become a journalist? That’s a question I occasionally field from graduate students and postdocs who are contemplating a switch of career from scientific research to science writing. My answer is not especially profound. I came to realize that I enjoyed writing up my research more than doing it. What’s more, I became increasingly troubled by Marcel Proust’s observation that we always end up doing the thing we are second best at. Was I a second-rate researcher? I wondered. Was there something else that I might be better at?Some of those inquisitive graduate students and postdocs go on to ask when in my career I decided to leave research: after a two-year postdoc in Japan and a six-year contractor position at NASA. Although I’m temperamentally and philosophically disinclined to revisit old decisions—or lack of decisions—I do so here in the hope that my reflections might help you.But first a digression. Among my fellow graduate students and friends at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy was Stephen Warren. Steve took the advice he was given at high school and studied engineering as an undergraduate with a view to pursuing a career in civil engineering. “It pays well,” his career adviser told him. He duly became a civil engineer. One of the projects he worked on was Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway.But being a practicing civil engineer was not for Steve, so he decided instead to do a PhD in the same subject. Perhaps it was his research topic, which entailed firing ball bearings at concrete, that failed to sustain his interest. He switched PhD programs to astronomy, discovered the first quasar with a redshift greater than 4, and became—and remains—an astronomer.Francis Crick had a similar road-to-Damascus conversion. Having earned a bachelor’s in physics at University College London, Crick embarked in 1937 on a physics PhD, also at UCL. His topic: measuring the viscosity of water at high temperatures. A Luftwaffe bomb destroyed his lab during the Blitz. Later during World War II he helped design magnetic and acoustic mines. After the war was over, he joined other physicists in switching to biology. Reminiscing, he regarded his original thesis topic as the “dullest problem imaginable”; becoming a biologist “felt like being born again.”My early course was different from Steve’s and Crick’s. Physics was my favorite subject in high school. I pursued it as an undergraduate at Imperial College London. Of the flavors of physics I was exposed to in my final year, I found astronomy the most interesting, so I did a PhD in the area that I found most interesting, x-ray astronomy. Chance played a role in my next moves. X-ray astronomy can only be conducted from space. The missions launched next were Japanese and then US.At the time I made them, my choices were natural and in accordance with professional career advice: Do what interests you. When I began to have doubts about my career, it was not because my research had become the equivalent of Steve’s ball bearings and Crick’s hot water. Rather, I came to enjoy the writing aspect of my job at NASA more than the research.If you’re reading this editorial, chances are it’s because you’re a member of one of the 10 professional societies that belong to the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today. Unlike me, you likely remain in an academic or research position.But if, like me 21 years ago, you’re having doubts about your career, then I can offer some advice. Doing something because it’s interesting isn’t enough, at least it wasn’t for me. You need to enjoy it, too. If you don’t, then start thinking of alternatives. Granted, many of us aren’t in a position to change tack completely and become a goat farmer, graphic novelist, or water colorist. We need the salary. Granted, too, changing careers is harder as we age.Still, it’s worth contemplating options. A modest approach is to examine your current job, as I did 21 years ago, and ask yourself what aspect of it you enjoy the most. You might be able to make that slice bigger and your pie more satisfying.© 2018 American Institute of Physics.

Challenges to Becoming an Early Childhood Teachers Through Deleuze’s“Proust and Signs”: Searching for a Sustainable Way to Implement a Project-Based STEM Education

본 연구는 한 교사공동체에게 프로젝트 기반 STEM교육을 제공하고, 이들이 어떻게 교실 현장에서 이를 실행하는지 그 과정에서 나타난 배움의 과정을 살펴보았다. 특히 들뢰즈의 프로스트와 기호들 에서 기술된 기호의 유형과 연결하여 배움에서 나타난 사유모습을 살펴보았다. 자료 분석은 후기 질적 연구방법에 의해 하였으며, 이를 통해 나타난 결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 마주친 기호에 민감한 경우 교사들은 새로운 여정으로 출발할 수 있으며, 그 마주침의 힘과 강도는 개인의 특이성에 따라 다르게 나타났다. 둘째, 배움의 과정에서 교사들은 주로 논리적인 사유를 하며, 들뢰즈가 말한 사교적 기호나 사랑의 기호처 럼 새로운 프로젝트 기반 STEM교육의 기호를 해석하고 있었다. 셋째, 마주침으로 인해 공동체 교사들은 때때로 유목적 사유를 하도록 도전을 받았다. 접속을 통해, 내부 작용을 통해, 혹은 움직임과 실험을 통해 교사들은 연구자, 유아들, 동료 교사들과 함께 얽힌 되기를 경험하였다. 본 연구는 Deleuze의 이론을 통해 유아교사들의 배움의 과정을 새로운 시각으로 살펴본 것에 그 의의가 있다고 하겠다.This study examined how one teacher community, which consisted of four 4 early childhood teachers, learned the ideas of project-based STEM education and implemented it in their classroom by the ideas in Deleuze’s book“Proust and Signs (French: Marcel Proust et les signes)”. For analyzing the data, it used Barad’s diffractive method. The results are as follows. First, encounter was important for learning. When early childhood teachers encountered a project-based STEM education as a new sign, the power and intensity of encounter influenced to early childhood teachers’participation of teacher learning community. Secondly, a new sign, called“project-based STEM education”, functioned as a machine. Some of these signs, such as worldly signs and signs of love functioned as a tool to search for lost time. Some of these signs, such as sensuous signs and signs of arts functioned as a tool to regain time. The signs of art can reveal the truth of difference. The interpretation of signs proceeds via an unfolding of differences. A sign is a difference that unfolds itself, and its unfolding is an ongoing repetition of its difference. Learning happened to experiment and movement in-between by encounterness. In this process, the members of teacher community become entangled teachers together.

Let Me Walk

Let Me Walk

Walking as Practice and Prose as Path Making: How Life Writing and Journey Can Intersect

Walking as Practice and Prose as Path Making: How Life Writing and Journey Can Intersect

In-Between Proust and Neuroscience

In his autobiography allusive of Marcel Proust’s literary autobiography À la recherche du temps perdu, Kandel describes and explores his own development as a molecular scientist who started out as a student of history and psychoanalysis with more than just a penchant for literature. Despite his conversion to neuroscience, which is told in great detail, Kandel’s motives in studying the brain are informed mainly by humanist ideals and episodes from his personal past. The author creates an image of himself as a scientist who is guided in his molecular research by both his good intuitions and received theories from the humanities. Hence, the aim of the present paper is to show how the author succeeds in modelling his scientific ethos at the interface of the humanities and the natural sciences and in what ways he generates a public image of himself as a ‘self-made man’ or, rather, scientist.

Proust et Hergé : de quelques points communs entre À la recherche du temps perdu et Les Aventures de Tintin

Proust and Hergé: on some similarities between À la Recherche du temps perdu and Les Aventures de Tintin. Part I. Marcel Proust and Hergé seem to have nothing in common. Their works are indeed very different: they do not belong to the same genre, nor treat the same themes or have the same public. What parallel could be established between À la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), which revolutionized the genre of the novel, and Les Aventures de Tintin (The Adventures of Tintin), a series of comic albums apparently intended only for children? A closer study reveals however that Proust and Hergé, beyond what one could think at first sight, share deep similarities on wh ich this article, published in two parts, will focus. First of all, À la Recherche du temps perdu as well as Les Aventures de Tintin rest on the creation of a specific world, which can be characterized by Balzac’s principle of returning characters and by the importance of the imaginary of space (Proust’s rêveries about the names of places, Hergé’s fictitious geography). Moreover, Proust and Hergé’s characters have a very singular language and linguistic features which can be identified easily (let us think of Dr. Cottard’s puns, of Odette’s anglicisms, etc. in Proust, o r of Captain Haddock’s insults or Dupond and Dupont’s slips of the tongue in Hergé). Eventually, Proust and Hergé both develop a reflection on time which gives rise to a singular temporality in their books, and more precisely a reflection on lost and regained time, with two opposite situations and therefore two opposite conceptions for each of the authors. This first part of our study focuses on the principle of returning characters adopted by Proust and Hergé, on their imaginary of space and on the language of their characters, while the second part, which will be published in the next issue of Interlitteraria, will be devoted to the problematics of time.

La promesa de felicidad en Proust y Miró

A menudo se han comparado las obras de Marcel Proust y de Gabriel Miró. Las afinidades estéticas de los dos autores contemporáneos se pueden entender a partir de sus modelos comunes decimonónicos. Entre ellos, Stendhal ocupa un lugar especial. Su sentencia sobre la belleza como una «promesa de felicidad» que cambia según el tipo de felicidad esperado en diferentes épocas y lugares, aparece en varios pasajes de À la recherche du temps perdu y de El obispo leproso. El uso narrativo del aforismo estético le añade nuevos contextos: mientras que Proust lo interpreta a la luz del impresionismo y a la sombra de la antropología moralista, Miró contrasta la «promesa de felicidad» con la promesa de salvación cristiana.

Rancière’s Proust: A Rebirth of Aesthetics

Philosopher and literary theorist, Jacques Rancière, has argued that Marcel Proust’s work as a novelist enables us to understand how modern literature articulates and largely resolves a specifically aesthetic crisis. From Rancière’s standpoint, Proust shows us how the dominant conflict in nineteenth-century French literature was carried beyond a mere opposition and given a new aesthetic significance in the modern novel. In this paper, I will discuss Jacques Rancière’s attempt to assess Proust’s contribution to literature in the wake of the aesthetic tradition epitomized by Kant and Schiller. Crucial to this attempt is the deployment of aesthetics as a historical discourse that introduces the possibility of variation in relation to the real. More specifically, I will examine Rancière’s argument that metaphor in Proust’s work has the capacity to transform a sense of doubleness into a new understanding of the real.