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.
General
Imprint: |
Princeton University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
July 2013 |
First published: |
July 2013 |
Authors: |
Christopher Prendergast
|
Dimensions: |
235 x 152 x 22mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
232 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-691-15520-3 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-691-15520-8 |
Barcode: |
9780691155203 |
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