Mirages and mad beliefs : Proust the skeptic / Christopher Prendergast.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Prendergast, Christopher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Skepticism in literature.

Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922--Criticism and interpretation.

Proust, Marcel.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (233 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, c2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Marcel Proust was long the object of a cult in which the main point of reading his great novel In Search of Lost Time was to find, with its narrator, a redemptive epiphany in a pastry and a cup of lime-blossom tea. We now live in less confident times, in ways that place great strain on the assumptions and beliefs that made those earlier readings possible. This has led to a new manner of reading Proust, against the grain. In Mirages and Mad Beliefs, Christopher Prendergast argues the case differently, with the grain, on the basis that Proust himself was prey to self-doubt and found numerous, if indirect, ways of letting us know. Prendergast traces in detail the locations and forms of a quietly nondogmatic yet insistently skeptical voice that questions the redemptive aesthetic the novel is so often taken to celebrate, bringing the reader to wonder whether that aesthetic is but another instance of the mirage or the mad belief that, in other guises, figures prominently in In Search of Lost Time. In tracing the modalities of this self-pressuring voice, Prendergast ranges far and wide, across a multiplicity of ideas, themes, sources, and stylistic registers in Proust's literary thought and writing practice, attentive at every point to inflections of detail, in a sustained account of Proust the skeptic for the contemporary reader.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

References and Abbreviations

Chapter One. Mad Belief

Chapter Two. Proustian Jokes

Chapter Three. Magic

Chapter Four. Éblouissement

Chapter Five. What's in a Comma?

Chapter Six. Walking on Stilts

Chapter Seven. Bodies and Ghosts

Chapter Eight. The Citizen of the Unknown Homeland

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781400846313

1400846315

9781299195875

1299195873

OCLC:

828869740