10. Talking Furniture: Féeries for a Troubled Time in Proust, Ravel, and Chomón

Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2025-01-03

Espacement thérapeutique et persistance du guselkumab en vie réelle : résultats d’une étude longitudinale chez les patients atteints de psoriasis

Annales de Dermatologie et de Vénéréologie - FMC · 2025-11-13

Persistance du guselkumab à trois ans dans la maladie psoriasique en vie réelle : analyse à partir du Système national des données de santé

Annales de Dermatologie et de Vénéréologie - FMC · 2025-11-13

Stories About Stories: A Borgesian Take on Premodern Circulation

Beoiberística Revista de Estudios Ibéricos Latinoamericanos y Comparativos · 2024-01-01

Along with other goods, texts, ideas and stories traveled along the Silk Road. One famous case of East-West circulation was the 1001 Nights. Another story, the Great Renunciation (the best-known version being the story of the Buddha) traveled across space and time, transforming, adapting and generating scores of versions. Scholars from the nineteenth century on have reflected on the global migration of stories, whether to point out the universal elements that account for the stories' transcultural adaptability, or to focus on the modular units that generate an exponential multiplicity of variants, in the wake of Goethean morphology. However, most often, premodern stories do not fold themselves neatly into the major contemporary theories of literary circulation, whether Franco Moretti’s model of imported form and local content, or Pascale Casanova’s Meridian model with its centripetal trajectory of texts through translations and literary prizes. David Damrosch’s definition of world literature as a “mode of reading and of circulation” does apply, but only in a broad and general sense. In this way, the East-West circulation of premodern tales offer a good point of entry into the current anxieties about the “presentism” of contemporary world literature theories. In this context, Borges's writings prove to be especially rewarding, offering us, not only a powerful re-reading of premodern literature, but also pathways for conceptualizing premodern circulation. The present essay looks at the ways in which these complicate, and also build on, an iconic master trope of literary circulation which is widely recognized as foundational to our discipline: the trope of the marketplace. Several of Borges’s stories and essays (“La busca de Averroes”, the essays on the circulation of the Buddha legend, and the texts about the 1001 Nights), offer both a metatextually productive illustration of current, often aporetical debates about global literary circulation, and creative strategies for a renewal of literary practice by returning to minor and/or archaic forms.

Vie imaginaire de Léonard de Vinci

eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2023-12-13 · 1 citations

Elisbeth A. HowE correspond l'ternel, I'universel, comme la posie runit le temps cyclique et le temps linaire.Valry a dit, propos des << Fragments du Narcisse >> : << Ce qui m'a particulirement requis... c'est la combinaison de la priode syntaxique flinarit] et de cene sructure musicale peqptuelle, le vers [circularit].>> Cette ide de runir le linaire et le ciculaire, le masculin et le fminin, rappelle le thyrse de Baudelaire dans les Petits Pomes en prose.' <<C'est l'lment fminin ex- cutant autour du mle ses prestigieuses pirouettes >, sauf que, chez Valry, l'lment fminin figure moins comme dcoration et plutt conme une partie essentielle de sa structure.

L’érudition imaginaire de Jorge Luis Borges

2023

• Humanities
• Art
• Geography

Living and Dying with Marcel Proust

Romanic Review · 2023 · 13 citations

• Psychoanalysis
• Art
• Art history

Living and Dying with Marcel Proust, Christopher Prendergast’s wonderful new book, departs from his previous scholarly books and invites the reader to an intimate meandering across Proust’s long novel, A la recherche du temps perdu. There are few footnotes, no critical references, not even page numbers for the many Proust quotations. Living and Dying with Marcel Proust is true to its name: this is the book of a reader who lives with Proust, not just in the sense that he spends his days reading Proust, but more profoundly that the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the Proustian world have entered into his world.It takes someone so steeped in Proust to write such a book, out of a vast archive of Proustian knowledge. The author is a scholar intimately familiar with the towering mass of Proustian criticism, familiar enough to move beyond the scholarship he has vitally absorbed and assimilated. Prendergast edited the new Penguin translation (2002) in which a team of translators produced an invigorating, fresh, and modern version of In Search of Lost Time, an exciting new take on the classic for English-language readers to compare with the canonical Moncrieff-Kilmartin version. More recently, he authored the brilliant Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic (2013), tackling the redemptive myth of the Recherche and engaging in a dense dialogue with some of the major readings of the book. This new project is a radical departure. It is not intended exclusively or even primarily for a scholarly audience. Its publisher is Europa Compass, whose mission is to publish books grounded in scholarship yet accessible to all. After decades of scholarly books, it is a remarkable achievement to be able to reach out to the proverbial (and proverbially elusive) general audience, the educated reader—albeit one already quite familiar with Proust.In twelve chapters and an epilogue, the book offers a series of “walks” through the many pages and themes of Proust. The preface reveals that an early project was meant to focus on walks, strolls, wanderings, outings, zigzags; the current book still retains some this itinerant dynamic, not as theme but as method. But even more than that, it is an exploration of what it means to live with a writer, with a book that, for its author, became assimilated, identified with life, and in the end a substitute for life. The gamble is to shed light on a peculiar experience: “a strong sense of felt connection between the reading subject and the read subject matter” (20), echoing the hypnagogic state described in the opening pages of the book where the narrator feels he has become the subject of the book he is reading.Three typical readers are introduced in the first chapter and return in the epilogue. These three ideal readers represent three aspects of Proust’s own personality shaped by illness: insomnia, asthma, and addiction. These superlatively Proustian conditions are connected with techniques of reading that cross over into life’s most physical dimension. The insomniac reads Proust’s long sentences to cure insomnia; the asthmatic reads Proust out loud as breathing exercises to overcome breathlessness; the addict reads Proust to exhaustion as a treatment for Proust addiction (admittedly a much rarer affliction: it would be interesting to ask if reading Proust ever cured anyone’s addiction to alcohol or nicotine, for example). With his three pathological cases, especially the second one (asthma), Prendergast is naturally following in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin’s landmark essay “The Image of Proust,” while taking the idea to its logical extreme: reading Proust is both poison and cure, a sort of “pharmakon.”This book goes to the heart of Proust’s “vibrant attention to the world” (32) in its concrete, embodied immediacy, linking distant episodes and seemingly discrete realms of existence in a tight web of networks, associations, and loops. Chapter 5, for example, titled simply “Pinks,” leads us from the color associated with springtime bloom, childhood delights, and desserts to painterly preferences and practices, but also to the more dangerous attractions of the Albertine sexual galaxy. Chapter titles (such as “The Quiver of Life,” “Croissants and Coffee, for a Change,” “Breasts and Cheeks,” and “Days”) capture the materiality of life, its sensory experiences, its colors, its tastes. The sensuality of the “chromophiliac” (79) Proustian world preserves it from its demons (snobbishness, irrelevance, frivolity . . . ) because even intellectual experiences are embodied. Crucially, the book shows, the human sensorium in Proust’s narrative fabric comes as a bundle in which the five senses are not hierarchical, nor even clearly separated, but fundamentally synesthetic (38).While it refrains from engaging directly with current Proust criticism, the book nonetheless resonates epistemologically with several critical endeavors of the last two decades, especially interpretations that aim to focus on the physicality of reading itself. Adam Watt’s Reading in Proust’s “A la Recherche” (2009) or Michael Syrotinski’s and Ian MacLachlan’s Sensual Reading (2001) come to mind; as well as Mieke Bal’s The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (1997), or Anne Simon’s Proust, ou, Le réel retrouvé: Le sensible et son expression dans A la recherche du temps perdu (2000). Proust’s famous (yet also paradoxical, heroic, counterintuitive) pronouncement against the intellect, “Daily I attach less value to the intellect,” which opens the essay Contre Sainte-Beuve is here not so much analyzed as incarnated in a reading that successfully concretizes the reading experience itself.This is also a book that belongs in a family of Proust-haunted memoirs. Although it contains no personal revelations, it gestures to a rich autobiographical afterlife of Proust’s novel, toward Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 or Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, with their granular focus on small and intense sensory experiences and memory-triggering objects—writing that, in Benjamin’s words, comes from things the way wine comes from grapes. Living and Dying shows us vividly how Proust’s book world is full of the rich fabric of life. And it also shows us how reading Proust can accompany us as we journey toward death, stopping many times along the way.The epilogue returns to the three ideal readers of Proust, who all suffer from some characteristically Proustian disability or handicap (the insomniac, the asthmatic, and the addict). Since they are all facets of the author himself, they give new life to another famous Proustian principle, which claims his book should be an optical instrument with which the reader can achieve self-reading. Prendergast also brings the book into the world of contemporary performance art by reflecting on “the staggering project of filmed readings of the Recherche initiated in 1993 by the filmmaker Véronique Aubouy under the disarmingly simple title Proust lu” (235). Aubouy’s (ongoing) film project confers a prodigious global reach to the book, with readers all over the world and from all walks of life reading a favorite passage out loud for the camera. Most meaningful among these afterlife stories is the anecdote Prendergast chooses to close his book: a man reading Proust out loud to his newborn son as a kind of lullaby. “Here then is Proust’s great work in living touch with what it itself is so much about, the primal life of the bodily unconscious” (239). Although death is so darkly dominant in Proust’s final volume, whether in the form of the Great War or the grim, lugubrious bal de têtes at the end (but indeed it is ubiquitous in Proust’s world, which is “death-haunted from start to finish” [219]), death here is displaced by the renewal of generations. Living and Dying thus compensates generously for the “childlessness of Proust’s world” (166), so strange for a book “famous for being about childhood,” so strikingly different from the prolific fictional worlds of Dickens and Tolstoy. (One is also reminded of Colette’s parallel pronouncement against the sadness of houses without animals, “l’aversion mélancolique des maisons sans bêtes,” in La Maison de Claudine). Living and Dying with Marcel Proust ends on the life-affirming scene of a baby being rocked to sleep by the “sound and swell” of Proust’s sentences. Turning away from the more established view of Proust as a case of writing swallowing up life, Prendergast’s book offers reading (reading Proust, for example) as a life-sustaining practice.

French Connections

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-11-30

This essay looks at the intertextual presence of French literature in Bolaño’s writings, which are famously global in their intersecting plots and cosmopolitan characters. With a focus on the contemporary urban experience, Bolaño elevates the Baudelairean flâneur motif to a global scale, and inherits the Surrealist topos of the city as a place of chance encounters. The quest for a missing or forgotten writer, a structuring device used over and over in Bolaño’s fictions, can be traced back to Surrealist aesthetics, and it also provides a serviceable image of a quest for the validation of narrative. We look at what Bolaño’s novels, in which“visceral realism” defeats the grand 19th-century principle of the well-constructed plot in favor of a loose stringing together of episodic lives, owe to the tradition of Marcel Schwob’s imaginary lives, to Georges Perec’s aesthetics of the collection, the list, and the “infra-ordinary,” and to more contemporary poets of documentary everydayness and small lives such as Pierre Michon and François Bon.

The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings by Richard Van Leeuwen

Marvels & Tales · 2022-01-01

Reviewed by: The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings by Richard Van Leeuwen Dominique Jullien (bio) The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings. By Richard Van Leeuwen, Brill, 2020, 832 pp. This is an ambitious and capacious survey of twentieth-century fiction, seen through the lens of the Thousand and One Nights as a foundational narrative text and a model for narrative innovation. As Van Leeuwen points out in his introduction, there have been many studies of intertextuality in various national literatures, but a comprehensive survey of the influence of the Nights on twentieth-century fiction as a whole had not been attempted so far. The author is an Arabist and a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam, the translator of the Nights into Dutch, and the coauthor (with Ulrich Marzolph) of the two-volume The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (2004). This study is also encyclopedic in its shape, method, and goals. The ambition of this learned and stimulating book is to explore a broad sample of [End Page 337] contemporary fiction. Readers find themselves immersed in an ocean of novels and stories. Admittedly, the book's corpus is limited to its author's area of linguistic and literary expertise: the only Asian representative is Japanese writer Haruki Murakami; there are no novelists from Africa, and only two from Latin America (Gabriel García Márquez, unsurprisingly, and more unexpectedly, the Cuban Abilio Estévez). Even so, this book covers such a range of writers, mostly from the Western and Middle Eastern traditions, and commands such an impressive number of languages (Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Danish, and Arabic) that it is already a world in itself. The study is organized into six thematic parts: "Enclosures, Journeys, and Texts"; "Capturing the Volatility of Time"; "The Textual Universe"; "Narrating History"; "Identifications, Impersonations, Doubles: The Discontents of (Post-) Modernity"; and "Aftermaths: The Delusions of Politics." Some of the framing themes are reminiscent of Proppian fairy-tale functions (enclosures and departures in Part 1), while others follow dominant themes of twentieth-century fiction, such as politics, time, postmodern metatextuality, or doubles. Each of these thematic umbrellas covers three or four chapters, pairing close comparative readings of two or three different writers. At times the writers are joined because they belong to the same literary movement (Oulipo members Italo Calvino and Georges Perec; magical realists Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie), or the same national or cultural tradition (Egyptian novelists Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, and Najib Mahfuz); other times the affinity is thematic (the Marquis de Sade and Angela Carter, for their entanglement of sexuality and storytelling), or formal (Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood, for storytelling as a deferral of death). Very often, the surprise pairing of canonical with less well-known writers is suggestive and exciting. There are numerous rewarding analyses: for instance, on the incidence of the signature technique of embedded tales-within-tales on André Gide's novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), with its narrative open-endedness and philosophical musings on chance. Or the pages on Proust, which tie back to Hoffmannsthal through the theme of the enclosed space as a narrative precondition, and lead forward to the Turkish writer and Proust admirer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62), in an original pairing that highlights the parallel focus on social and historical upheavals in French and Turkish societies, in tension with the narrator's individual time. Claiming no allegiance to a critical method beyond specific studies of individual novelists and novels, the author describes his book as "a mosaiclike overview of different kinds of intertextual relationships" (13). A wise decision, given the vastness of the field. As Robert Irwin acknowledged in his classic Companion to the Arabian Nights (2004), it is an easier task to list the books not influenced by the Nights; quite sensibly, Van Leeuwen also begins by [End Page 338] recognizing the daunting challenge of tracing that ubiquitous influence. His method (multiple close readings) endeavors to do justice to this multitude of rewritings. The book aims to describe an encyclopedic abundance of novels; it does not aspire to theorize. Yet, as readers venture into...

Portrait de l’artiste en mille morceaux: le roman d’artiste dans La Vie mode d’emploi

eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2021-06-28