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This volume of edited essays is the first one in English to offer a
critical overview of the specific features of Belgian modernity
from 1880 to 1940 in a multiplicity of disciplines: literature and
poetry, politics, music, photography and drama. The first half of
the book investigates the roots of twentieth century modernity in
Belgian fin de sicle across a variety of genres (novel, poetry and
drama), not only within but also beyond the boundaries of
Symbolism. The contributors go on to examine the explosion of
Belgian culture on the international scene with the rise of the
avant-gardes, notably Surrealism: and the contribution made in
minor genres, such as the popular novels of Simenon and Jean Ray,
and the Tintin comics of Herg.
Proust and the Visual is an edited volume of essays written by
Proustian specialists, concerned with a rich phenomenological
category, the "visual" whose prominent role in the novel is at the
heart of its modernity. The "visual" is defined as manifesting in
the image not only space, but also time. The "visual" is considered
as a category that delineates the conditions of possibility of all
visibility and constitutes an integral part of both the progression
of the narrator's journey towards becoming a writer and of the
unfolding of the novel itself.
The relationship between Marcel Proust and John Ruskin has always
attracted interest. However, the influence of the English art
critic was seen essentially in terms of cultural inputs. At the
same time, as a translator, Proust was not taken seriously: 'Au
fond vous ne savez pas l'anglais et cela doit etre plein de
contresens' said to him the Prince de Brancovan. Proust's irate
response was that perhaps he didn't know the English language, but
he profoundly knew his Ruskin. In fact, his translations were
unanimously well received. In her original work, Nathalie Aubert
demonstrates that the reason why Proust embarked on his
translations was that he had experienced the inadequacy of his own
language, forcing him to abandon his first novel. She shows that
the obscurity of Ruskin's text helped him to establish in La
Recherche a constant tension between insignificance and meaning.
Informed by phenomenology, she points out that this tension is a
temporal process, due to the complexity of the Visual and that the
structural link between translation and metaphor is a bridge
between text and reality via the Visual.
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