Download or read book Proust s Overcoat written by Lorenza Foschini and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-07-18 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A rare and wonderfully written book of literary detection that is heartbreaking as well as thrilling.” —Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient In the tradition of Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman comes Proust’s Overcoat by Lorenza Foschini—the charming, endlessly intriguing story of a collector’s obsessive search for the personal effects of legendary author Marcel Proust. This fascinating true story introduces readers to a truly delightful character—Jacques Guérin, owner of a perfume company in France—and enthralls them with his relentless lifelong pursuit of all things Proustian, even the author’s most mundane possessions.

Download or read book Marcel Proust in Context written by Adam Watt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging volume of essays provides an illuminating set of approaches to the multifaceted contexts of Proust's life and work.

Download or read book Proust s in Search of Lost Time written by Katherine Elkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Unlike most fiction writers, Proust was trained in philosophy. In fact, he even considered writing a philosophical treatise instead of the novel we know so well. This hesitation about what form his writing should take still haunts his final choice of a novel, which is both philosophical, and yet, not philosophy. Take your pick of philosophers, from Plato to Nietzsche, and you can easily find an essay or even a book arguing that this particular philosopher most applies to Proust. But as one plunges into the narrative that he finally wrote, one is struck by the fact that In Search of Lost Time feels nothing like what we often call a philosophical novel, or even, a novel of ideas. Instead, philosophical reflection lies in the shadows of his fictional world, a sort of parallel life that can be found in the underweave"--

Download or read book Monsieur Proust s Library written by Anka Muhlstein and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels. In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing not only a friendly introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.

Download or read book In Looking Back One Learns to See Marcel Proust and Photography written by Mary Bergstein and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcel Proust offered the twentieth century a new psychology of memory and seeing. His novel In Search of Lost Time was written in the modern age of photography and art history. In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography is an intellectual adventure that brings to light Proust’s visual imagination, his visual metaphors, and his photographic resources and imaginings. The book features over 90 illustrations. Mary Bergstein highlights various kinds of photography: daguerreotypes, stereoscopic cards, cartes-de-visite, postcards, book illustrations, and other photographic mediums. Portraiture, medical photography, spirit photography, architectural photography, Orientalism, ethnographic photography, and fin-de-siècle studies of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Vermeer, are considered in terms of Proust’s life and work. The net is cast wide, and each image under discussion has been researched with subtle attention to art, literature, and cultural history. This scholarly study in literature and visual culture will be a delight, too, for general readers who love photography or Proust. Mary Bergstein is professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She won the 2012 “Courage to Dream” book prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association for, Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell 2010). She has published numerous books and articles on art and visual culture from Italian Renaissance sculpture to contemporary photography.

Download or read book Cultural Passions written by Elizabeth Wilson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Wilson is one of our most radical cultural critics. In "Cultural Passions" she transcends the division between 'high' and 'low' culture, exploring the emotional commitment people bring to the books, performances, objects and rituals in which they find meaning and challenging an enduring suspicion of the pleasure of the aesthetic. Ranging from Marcel Proust to tarot readings, from urban planning to interiors, Elizabeth Wilson investigates an underlying Puritanism in critical commentary on matters as wide ranging as Roger Federer and C S Lewis, Surrealism and fashion and the relationship of religion to fan culture. She questions why pleasure appears suspect, even as consumer society incites it and turns life into entertainment. She questions why there is such fear of elitism when at the same time the fans of mass culture are held in contempt. Subverting conventional views, her oblique point of view provides startling insights on both familiar and marginal cultural experiences.

Download or read book Beckett s Art of Salvage written by Julie Bates and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-19 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Miscellaneous Rubbish -- Relics -- Heirlooms -- Props -- Treasure -- Conclusion

Download or read book Lost Time written by Jozef Czapski and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II. During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.

Download or read book Almost Nothing The 20th Century Art and Life of J zef Czapski written by Eric Karpeles and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling biography of the Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski that takes readers to Paris in the Roaring Twenties, to the front lines during WWII, and into the late 20th-century art world. Józef Czapski (1896–1993) lived many lives during his ninety-six years. He was a student in Saint Petersburg during the Russian Revolution and a painter in Paris in the roaring twenties. As a Polish reserve officer fighting against the invading Nazis in the opening weeks of the Second World War, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets. For reasons unknown to this day, he was one of the very few excluded from Stalin’s sanctioned massacres of Polish officers. He never returned to Poland after the war, but worked tirelessly in Paris to keep alive awareness of the plight of his homeland, overrun by totalitarian powers. Czapski was a towering public figure, but painting gave meaning to his life. Eric Karpeles, also a painter, reveals Czapski’s full complexity, pulling together all the threads of this remarkable life.

Download or read book In Memory of Memory written by Maria Stepanova and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Download or read book City of Angels written by Christa Wolf and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stunning final novel from East Germany's most acclaimed writer Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writer Christa Wolf was granted access to her newly declassified Stasi files. Known for her defiance and outspokenness, Wolf was not especially surprised to discover forty-two volumes of documents produced by the East German secret police. But what was surprising was a thin green folder whose contents told an unfamiliar—and disturbing—story: in the early 1960s, Wolf herself had been an informant for the Communist government. And yet, thirty years on, she had absolutely no recollection of it. Wolf's extraordinary autobiographical final novel is an account of what it was like to reckon with such a shocking discovery. Based on the year she spent in Los Angeles after these explosive revelations, City of Angels is at once a powerful examination of memory and a surprisingly funny and touching exploration of L.A., a city strikingly different from any Wolf had ever visited. Even as she reflects on the burdens of twentieth-century history, Wolf describes the pleasures of driving a Geo Metro down Wilshire Boulevard and watching episodes of Star Trek late at night. Rich with philosophical insights, personal revelations, and vivid descriptions of a diverse city and its citizens, City of Angels is a profoundly humane and disarmingly honest novel—and a powerful conclusion to a remarkable career in letters.

Download or read book Unfolding the Past written by Elizabeth Wilson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Wilson is a pioneer of fashion studies, yet she never intended to become an academic. Starting her literary career as a feminist activist writing for the underground press, she went on to explore tennis, 'bohemians' and of course fashion – her obsession – along with forays into fiction. Throughout, she has never seen her work as abstract or disengaged from 'real life'. In her memoir, she traces this relationship between personal experience and her writing, revisiting pivotal moments from childhood, adolescence and adult life to explore her belief that research, by its nature, is always a form of autobiography. She unfolds the garment of her life in a wide-ranging exploration of scenes from her past: her difficult relationship with her mother, fashion in the 60s and gay liberation. In this journey through time she shows how experiences are inseparable from the way we seek to explain and understand them, offering a unique and deeply personal account of her – and our – cultural world.

Download or read book Genius Anxiety written by Norman Lebrecht and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively chronicle of the years 1847­–1947—the century when the Jewish people changed how we see the world—is “[a] thrilling and tragic history…especially good on the ironies and chain-reaction intimacies that make a people and a past” (The Wall Street Journal). In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. They all had a gift for thinking in wholly original, even earth-shattering ways. In 1847, the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How? Why? Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent, beautifully designed volume is “an urgent and moving history” (The Spectator, UK) and a celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.

Download or read book My Autobiography of Carson McCullers A Memoir written by Jenn Shapland and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the National Book Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love. Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers’s life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others’ narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers’s life—her history, her secrets, her legacy—reveal to Shapland about herself? In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation’s greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.

Download or read book Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum 1881 1914 written by Elizabeth Emery and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did writers' private homes become so linked to their work that contemporaries began preserving them as museums? Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum addresses this and other questions by providing an overview of the social forces that brought writers' homes to the forefront of the French imagination at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. This study analyzes representations of the apartments and houses of Corneille, Hugo, Balzac, Dumas, Sand, Zola, Loti, Montesquiou, Mallarm?and Proust, among others, arguing that the writer's home became a contested space and an important part of the French patrimony at this time. This is the first book to emphasize the house museum as an essentially modern construct, and to trace the history of ideas leading to its institutionalization in twentieth-century France. The interdisciplinary study also brings new attention to the importance of photojournalism for fin-de-si?e France - and brings to light fascinating and forgotten examples of 'at home' photography by Dornac and Henri Mairet. Elizabeth Emery provides a fresh and compelling perspective on conjunctions between visual, literary, and material cultures.

Download or read book Proust and America written by Michael Murphy and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. “It is strange,” Proust wrote in 1909, “that, in the most widely different departments . . . there should be no other literature which exercises over me so powerful an influence as English and American.” In the spirit of Proust’s admission, this engaging and critical volume offers the first comparative reading of the French novelist in the context of American art, literature, and culture. In addition to examining Proust’s key American influences—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, and James McNeill Whistler—Proust and America investigates the previously overlooked influence of the American neurologist George Beard, whose writings on neurasthenia and “American nervousness” contributed to the essential modernity of the author’s work.

Download or read book Proust The early years written by George Duncan Painter and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography of French novelist, essayist, and criticl Marcel Proust.