Figures of the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust

Figures of the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust PDF Author: Michael R. Finn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316885682
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
An original, wide-ranging contribution to the study of French writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book examines the ways in which the unconscious was understood in literature in the years before Freud. Exploring the influence of medical and psychological discourse over the existence and/or potential nature of the unconscious, Michael R. Finn discusses the resistance of feminists opposing medical diagnoses of the female brain as the seat of the unconscious, the hypnotism craze of the 1880s and the fascination, in fiction, with dual personality and posthypnotic crimes. The heart of the study explores how the unconscious inserts itself into the writing practice of Flaubert, Maupassant and Proust. Through the presentation of scientific evidence and quarrels about the psyche, Michael R. Finn is able to show the work of such writers in a completely new light.

Figures of the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust

Figures of the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust PDF Author: Michael R. Finn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316885682
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
An original, wide-ranging contribution to the study of French writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book examines the ways in which the unconscious was understood in literature in the years before Freud. Exploring the influence of medical and psychological discourse over the existence and/or potential nature of the unconscious, Michael R. Finn discusses the resistance of feminists opposing medical diagnoses of the female brain as the seat of the unconscious, the hypnotism craze of the 1880s and the fascination, in fiction, with dual personality and posthypnotic crimes. The heart of the study explores how the unconscious inserts itself into the writing practice of Flaubert, Maupassant and Proust. Through the presentation of scientific evidence and quarrels about the psyche, Michael R. Finn is able to show the work of such writers in a completely new light.

Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust

Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust PDF Author: Jennifer Rushworth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192508288
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book brings together, in a novel and exciting combination, three authors who have written movingly about mourning: two medieval Italian poets, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca, and one early twentieth-century French novelist, Marcel Proust. Each of these authors, through their respective narratives of bereavement, grapples with the challenge of how to write adequately about the deeply personal and painful experience of grief. In Jennifer Rushworth's analysis, discourses of mourning emerge as caught between the twin, conflicting demands of a comforting, readable, shared generality and a silent, solitary respect for the uniqueness of any and every experience of loss. Rushworth explores a variety of major questions in the book, including: what type of language is appropriate to mourning? What effect does mourning have on language? Why and how has the Orpheus myth been so influential on discourses of mourning across different time periods and languages? Might the form of mourning described in a text and the form of closure achieved by that same text be mutually formative and sustaining? In this way, discussion of the literary representation of mourning extends to embrace topics such as the medieval sin of acedia, the proper name, memory, literary epiphanies, the image of the book, and the concept of writing as promise. In addition to the three primary authors, Rushworth draws extensively on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. These rich and diverse psychoanalytical and French theoretical traditions provide terminological nuance and frameworks for comparison, particularly in relation to the complex term melancholia.

Proust and Joyce in Dialogue

Proust and Joyce in Dialogue PDF Author: Sarah Tribout-Joseph
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351552945
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
It might reasonably be asked what the connection is between Francoises malapropisms in Proust and the erudite allusions of Stephens interior monologue in Joyce. Tribout-Joseph argues that they are indeed interrelated. Proust and Joyce are exemplary of Modernisms reconciliation of high literature with popular voices. Both writers explore the process of incorporation, the interface between speech and narrative. Fragments of discourse are taken from diverse sources and reoriented within new contexts. Proposed here are interconnected close readings of socio-political debate, body talk, listening processes, silences, intertextual echoes, cliche, register, conflated voices, chatter, gossip, eavesdropping, internalized debate, and misunderstandings which allow for a new configuration of the authors to emerge.

Marcel Proust in Context

Marcel Proust in Context PDF Author: Adam Watt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107021898
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This wide-ranging volume of essays provides an illuminating set of approaches to the multifaceted contexts of Proust's life and work.

The Cambridge Companion to Proust

The Cambridge Companion to Proust PDF Author: Richard Bales
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826115
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Proust, first published in 2001, aims to provide a broad account of the major features of Marcel Proust's great work A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). The specially commissioned essays, by acknowledged experts on Proust, address a wide range of issues relating to his work. Progressing from background and biographical material, the chapters investigate such essential areas as the composition of the novel, its social dimension, the language in which it is couched, its intellectual parameters, its humour, its analytical profundity and its wide appeal and influence. Particular emphasis is placed on illustrating the discussion of issues by frequent recourse to textual quotation (in both French and English) and close analysis. This is the only contributory volume of its kind on Proust currently available. Together with its supportive material, a detailed chronology and bibliography, it will be of interest to scholars and students alike.

Mourning and Creativity in Proust

Mourning and Creativity in Proust PDF Author: Anna Magdalena Elsner
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113760073X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tribute to those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.

The Threshold of the Visible World

The Threshold of the Visible World PDF Author: Kaja Silverman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317795989
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
In The Threshold of the Visible World Kaja Silverman advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic, exploring the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies.

The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust

The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust PDF Author: Thomas Baldwin
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039103232
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book describes the development of Proust's treatment of material objects from his earliest work Les Plaisirs et les jours to his mature novel À la recherche du temps perdu. It examines the literary influences on Proust's way with objects in the light of certain critical texts and reconsiders the significance of Ruskin. As the movement from unreflective and spontaneous representation to a meta-narrative of consciousness is traced, some questions as to the banality of the 'banal object' arise. The meta-narrative finds resonance in a peculiarly Proustian pictoriality which has been largely unnoticed. It resides in descriptions where objects appear simultaneously or at different times as things in paintings and in the real. By exploring connections between Proust's pictoriality and his reflections on 'matière' and 'surface', the author suggests a radical approach to the modernism of À la recherche du temps perdu.

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust PDF Author: Philip Thody
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1349190101
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
The starting point of A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) is an experience everyone has had. We have all had a physical sensation that has reminded us so vividly of a moment in our past that we have almost ceased to be aware of the present. Marcel Proust immortalized this in the first volume of his fifteen-volume novel, in 1913. But the novel, completed just before his death in 1922, deals with many other themes. It is an account of how the narrator, Marcel, discovers his vocation as an artist and explores the nature of art. As a psychological novel, it studies jealousy and how the emotional traumas we undergo in childhood can influence our adult lives. It is the first major novel to offer a detailed account of male and female homosexuality. It is a satirical analysis of French upper-class society at the turn of the century. It also shows how this society changes with time. Philip Thody offers a straightforward analysis of how Proust's novel is constructed, what it contains, and how its themes can be related to our experiences as members of American or English society in the late twentieth century. He explains one of the most complex prose narratives in terms that both educate and entertain the reader who may be unfamiliar with Proust and his work. '...(Thody) writes in a most engagingly down-to-earth manner, conveying a real sense of enthusiasm, and positively luring the reader towards his potentially daunting subject ... Professor Thody's contribution holds its own with ease.' - Modern and Contemporary France.

Madness in Twentieth-century French Women's Writing

Madness in Twentieth-century French Women's Writing PDF Author: Suzanne Dow
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039115402
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This book offers a discussion of the trope of madness in twentieth-century French women's writing, focusing on close readings of the following texts: Violette Leduc's L'Asphyxie (1946), Marguerite Duras's Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), Simone de Beauvoir's 'La Femme rompue' (1967), Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire (1975), Jeanne Hyvrard's Les Prunes de Cythère (1975) and Mère la mort (1976). The discussion traces the evolution in the way madness is taken up by women authors from the key period starting just prior to the emergence of second-wave feminism and culminating at the height of the écriture féminine project. This study argues that madness offers itself up to these authors as a powerful means to convey a certain ambivalence towards changing contemporary ideas on the authority of authorship. On the one hand a highly enabling means to figure transgression, the madwoman is equally the repository for a twentieth-century 'anxiety of authorship' on the part of the woman writer.