Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Marcel Proust (2004) (304p) [Inua].pdf

Marcel Proust (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Hardcover – September, 2003
by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 295 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L); Revised edition (September 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791076598
ISBN-13: 978-0791076590


A collection of critical essays discuss the works of the French writer.

Editor’s Note
This revised volume has only my Introduction in common with the earlier Marcel Proust: Modern Critical Views (1987), since all the essays included here date from 1993 on.
My Introduction compares Proust and Freud on the psychosexual origins of jealousy, and then centers upon the odysseys of sexual jealousy in Swann and in Marcel.
Julia Kristeva, with authentic charm, rightfully gives us a Proust who is closer to Spinoza than to Heideger, while Robert Fraser contrasts George Eliot’s powers of observation with Flaubert’s moral withdrawal, antithetical influences upon Proust.
John Ruskin, another crucial Proustian precursor, is shown by Cynthia J. Gamble to have provided a model for Odette, Swann’s provocation to self-destruction, after which Jan Hokenson traces the limits of Japanese aestheticism in Proust’s vast saga.
Susan Stewart usefully sees Proust turning from a study of the nostalgias to the happiness of aesthetic apprehension, while Sara Danius sets Joyce against Proust in their effort to absorb technological change.
For Ingrid Wassenaar, In Search of Lost Time joins itself to the history of self-justification, after which Proust’s biographer, William C. Carter, examines his subject’s grand edifice of recollection.
Siân Reynolds subtly presents the fear of women embedded in the French culture of Proust’s era, while Anthony R. Pugh clarifies the ending of Swann’s Way.
Maureen A. Ramsden finds Proust’s early Jean Santeuil a guide to the aesthetics of In Search of Lost Time, while Gabrielle Starr concludes with a fresh vision of the Proustian aesthetics.