The gardens of desire : Marcel Proust and the fugitive sublime / by Stephen Gilbert Brown.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brown, Stephen Gilbert, 1949-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

Proust, Marcel.

Desire in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (254 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, c2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The Gardens of Desire is at once a model of literary interpretation and a groundbreaking psychocritical reading of a literary masterpiece, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Shedding new light on the origins of the creative impulse in general, and on the psychological origins of the Recherche in particular, the book illuminates the hidden associations between matricidal, suicidal, sadistic, masochistic, homoerotic, and creative impulses as manifested in Proust's work. The book moves beyond traditional Freudian readings of Proust to consider the theories of Otto Rank, Jacques Derrida, and others, and provides provocative readings of the "privileged moments" that comprise many of the work's "critical cruxes," as well as a thought-provoking rereading of the novel's ending. Both elegant and accessible, this book boldly explores the violence of desire as it relates not only to Proust's narrator, but also to Proustian criticism itself, with its own violent desire to appropriate the essence of Proust's masterpiece.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Entering the Garden

The Kiss of Death: Desire in the Garden of Good and Evil

The Art of Sapphic Desire: The Curse of the Little Phrase

The Hymenoptera of Self and Other: The Making and (Un)Making of Knowledge

Three Moments of Desire: The Ideal, the Real, and the Remembered

Recherche and the Rankian Gaze

The Art of Madness

References

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-240) and index.

ISBN:

9780791484968

0791484963

9781423739906

1423739906

OCLC:

62739620