proust's way: a field guide to In search of lost time

Roger Shattuck

10 Reviews

W. W. Norton & Company, Aug 1, 2001 - Literary Criticism - 290 pages


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For any reader who has been humbled by the language, the density, or the sheer weight of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Roger Shattuck is a godsend. Winner of the National Book Award for Marcel Proust, a sweeping examination of Proust's life and works, Shattuck now offers a useful and eminently readable guidebook to Proust's epic masterpiece, and a contemplation of memory and consciousness throughout great literature. Here, Shattuck laments Proust's defenselessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, and presents Proust as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched only by his irrepressible comic sense. Proust's Way, the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, will serve as the next generation's guide to one of the world's finest writers of fiction.

architexts of memory: literature, science, and autobiography

Evelyne Ender

University of Michigan Press, 2005 - Literary Criticism - 305 pages

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In this impressively interdisciplinary study, Evelyne Ender revisits master literary works to suggest that literature can serve as an experimental laboratory for the study of human remembrance. She shows how memory not only has a factual basis but is inseparable from fictional and aesthetic elements. Beautifully written in accessible prose, and impressive in its scope, the book takes up works by Proust, Woolf, George Eliot, Nerval, Lou Andreas-Salome, and Sigmund Freud, getting to the heart of essential questions about mental images, empirical knowledge, and the devastations of memory loss in ways that are suggestive and profound. Architexts of Memory joins a growing body of work in the lively field of memory studies, drawing from clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology as well as literary studies.

"An important, cogently argued, subtle and rich study of a topic of great interest."
--Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam

"A work of literary studies positioned at the intersection of tradition and innovation. Evelyne Ender's book brings fashionable cultural concerns to bear on traditional literary texts-her superb pedagogical skills lure and guide the reader through the most difficult psychoanalytical concepts."
--Nelly Furman, Cornell University


Selected Chapters:
The Aroma of the past: Marcel Proust and the Science of Memory


Painting the Past: Virginia Woolf's Memory Images


Proustian Memory Gardens

literary memory: scott's waverley novels and the the psychology of narrative

Catherine Jones

0 Reviews

Bucknell University Press, 2003 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 249 pages

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This book draws together three different but related kinds of inquiry. First, it approaches the history and theory of memory in the long eighteenth century to focus on the philosophical and literary writing of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Scotland. Debates about the significance and working of memory and the nature of cognition were recurrent and contentious throughout the period, and were particularly pronounced in Scotland, where the psychological tradition of Common Sense philosophy developed in response to the skeptical metaphysics of David Hume. This book examines the importance of these debates for the literature and culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Walter Scott is exemplary, as his thinking about memory was conditioned by the epistemological arguments of the Scottish Enlightenment. Second, it studies Scott's rhetoric of memory and his engagement with, and transformation of, Enlightenment psychological categories, most significantly in the Waverley Novels. Finally, this book is concerned with the role of memory in literary creativity.

literature, literary history and cultural memory

Herbert Grabes

0 Reviews

Gunter Narr Verlag, Sep 23, 2005 - 378 pages

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Chapters:

Memory of Literature: 

Parody as Cultural Memory by Jean-Jacques Lecercle (it could be said that the scene 'Scholars in the Bamboo Grove' scene in the novel is an example of 'parody as cultural memory'

Memory in Literature

Literature as a Medium of Collective Memory

Relational Theories

the cambridge introduction to marcel proust

Adam Watt

Cambridge University Press, Apr 7, 2011 - Literary Criticism - 141 pages

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"Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-27) changed the course of modern narrative fiction. This Introduction provides an account of Proust's life, the socio-historical and cultural contexts of his work and an assessment of his early works. At its core is a volume-by-volume study of In Search of Lost Time, which attends to its remarkable superstructure, as well as to individual images and the intricacies of Proust's finely-stitched prose. The book reaches beyond stale commonplaces of madeleines and memory, alerting readers to Proust's verbal virtuosity, his preoccupations with the fleeting and the unforeseeable, with desire, jealousy and the nature of reality. Lively, informative chapters on Proust criticism and the work's afterlives in contemporary culture provide a multitude of paths to follow. The book charges readers with the energy and confidence to move beyond anecdote and hearsay and to read Proust's novel for themselves"--Provided by publisher.

how societies remember

Paul Connerton

3 Reviews

Cambridge University Press, Nov 2, 1989 - Art - 121 pages

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In treating memory as a cultural rather than an individual faculty, this book provides an account of how bodily practices are transmitted in, and as, traditions. Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on written, or inscribed transmissions of memories. Paul Connerton, on the other hand, concentrates on bodily (or incorporated) practices, and so questions the currently dominant idea that literary texts may be taken as a metaphor for social practices generally. The author argues that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances and that performative memory is bodily. Bodily social memory is an essential aspect of social memory, but it is an aspect which has until now been badly neglected. An innovative study, this work should be of interest to researchers into social, political and anthropological thought as well as to graduate and undergraduate students.


Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on written practices and how they are transmitted. This study concentrates on incorporated practices and provides an account of how these things are transmitted in and as traditions. The author argues that images and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances, and that performative memory is bodily. This is an essential aspect of social memory that until now has been badly neglected.

storm from paradise: the politics of jewish memory

Jonathan Boyarin 


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"Usefully complicating common sense understandings of history, catastrophe, loss, otherness, and possibility through reflections on contemporary Jewishness, Boyarin draws on Benjamins's famous image of the Angel of History blown into the future by a "storm from paradise" to constantly interrogate and recuperate the past, "without pretending for long that we can recoup its plentitude". The book's seven thoughtful essays are at times deliberately intangible but always worth reading. An important book for the rethinking of the relevance of Jewishness to anthropology and cultural studies." –Religious Studies Review
"An essay in the richest sense of that term, inspired by and modeled on Walter Benjamin's essays. Based on varied, diverse, and abundantly cross-disciplinary readings, it moves and builds, questions and interrogates, and ultimately convinces us that the Jewish experience with being the 'other' and, conversely and recently, with 'othering' is indeed relevant to theorists of contemporary culture." –Marianne Hirsch

Boyarin ( Polish Jews in Paris ) has crafted seven interlocking essays on the function of memory in contemporary Jewish thought, ranging from an elegant, scholarly evocation of the Orthodox community on the Lower East Side, seen as a palpable embodiment of the dynamics of forgetting, to such seemingly unrelated phenomena as the work of Native American novelist Gerald Vizenor and French Jewish writer Patrick Modiano and, above all, of critic Walter Benjamin. Boyarin's theme is ``Othering,'' the process by which Jews and other perennial outsiders are set apart. Taken individually, the essays are often frustratingly difficult, but the book closes with two brilliant and accessible pieces on the place of Jews in the progressive left and the relationship of Jews and Palestinians, offering a balance of radical politics and insistent Jewish identity that challenges facile political correctness. As he sagely points out, ``the silencing of discourse about Jewish difference'' is accomplished through eliding Jews into the ``Eurocentric white male'' camp and failing to register the reality of Christianity as a dominant (and often oppressive) force in Western history.