A01=Christopher Prendergast
Abbreviation
Adjective
Adverb
Aestheticism
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Allegory
Allusion
Ambivalence
Amiens
Analogy
Antithesis
Author_Christopher Prendergast
Autobiography
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Baptistery
Brothel
Cambridge University Press
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Church bell
Cognition
Combray
Consciousness
Contre Sainte-Beuve
COP=United States
Defamiliarization
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Desecration
Digression
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Erudition
Evocation
Fairy tale
Fiction
Figure of speech
George Sand
Ideology
Idolatry
Illustration
Impressionism
In Search of Lost Time
Inference
Irony
Jacques Derrida
Joke
Language_English
Le Figaro
Literature
Lucien Daudet
Marcel Proust
Metaphor
Narcissism
Narrative
Novel
PA=Available
Parody
Paul de Man
Philosopher
Philosophy
Poetry
Price_€50 to €100
Prose
PS=Active
Refusal
Romanticism
Seascape
Sincerity
Skepticism
softlaunch
Solipsism
Subjectivity
Superiority (short story)
The Other Hand
The Philosopher
The Various
Thought
Transubstantiation
Uncertainty
Understanding
University of California
Walter Benjamin
Writer
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691155203
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jul 2013
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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.
Christopher Prendergast is professor emeritus of French at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of King's College and the British Academy. He is the general editor of the Penguin translation of In Search of Lost Time.
