scholarly journals Love and Transience in Proust

Philosophy ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robbie Kubala
Keyword(s):  
Reading First ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Martha Nussbaum ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Epistemic Standard ◽  
Evaluative Standard ◽  
Lost Time

AbstractOne strand of recent philosophical attention to Marcel Proust's novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, exemplified by Martha Nussbaum and Rae Langton, claims that romantic love is depicted in the text as self-regarding and solipsistic. I aim to challenge this reading. First, I demonstrate that the text contains a different view, overlooked by these recent interpreters, according to which love is directed at the partially knowable reality of another. Second, I argue that a better explanation for Proust's narrator's ultimate renunciation of romantic love appeals not to his impossible epistemic standard for knowledge of another person, but to his demanding evaluative standard for the permanence of love. This interpretation takes into account the broader scope of the novel, connecting with its larger themes of lost time and the desire for stability, and is more charitable, connecting to familiar worries about transience and constancy in loving relationships.

Le premier moment de l’art dans À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust – une « leçon d’idéalisme » ?

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Larisa Botnari
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Aesthetic Thinking

Although very famous, some key moments of the novel In Search of Lost Time, such as those of the madeleine or the uneven pavement, often remain enigmatic for the reader. Our article attempts to formulate a possible philosophical interpretation of the narrator's experiences during these scenes, through a confrontation of the Proustian text with the ideas found in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) of the German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling. We thus try to highlight the essential role of the self in Marcel Proust's aesthetic thinking, by showing that the mysterious happiness felt by the narrator, and from which the project of creating a work of art is ultimately born, is similar to the experiences of pure self-consciousness evoked and analyzed by Schellingian philosophy of art.

Agnes Grey

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Brontë ◽  
Sally Shuttleworth
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Anne Bronte ◽  
Agnes Grey

‘How delightful it would be to be a governess!’ When the young Agnes Grey takes up her first post as governess she is full of hope; she believes she only has to remember ‘myself at their age’ to win her pupils’ love and trust. Instead she finds the young children she has to deal with completely unmanageable. They are, as she observes to her mother, ‘unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures’. In writing her first novel, Anne Brontë drew on her own experiences, and one can trace in the work many of the trials of the Victorian governess, often stranded far from home, and treated with little respect by her employers, yet expected to control and educate her young charges. Agnes Grey looks at childhood from nursery to adolescence, and it also charts the frustrations of romantic love, as Agnes starts to nurse warmer feelings towards the local curate, Mr Weston. The novel combines astute dissection of middle-class social behaviour and class attitudes with a wonderful study of Victorian responses to young children which has parallels with debates about education that continue to this day.

scholarly journals On Philosophical Themes in Marcel Proust’s Works

2018 ◽  
pp. 78-95
Author(s):  
I. I. Blauberg
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philosophical Psychology ◽  
Optical Instrument ◽  
The Past ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
The World ◽  
Lost Time

Marcel Proust’s works contain a lot of ideas consonant with the ideas that were actively discussed by philosophers of his time. Many philosophers focused on the issues of perception, memory, will, freedom, personal identity, etc., which constituted an important part of academic curriculum. Proust familiarized himself with the issues studying philosophy at the Lyceum (he was taught by Alphonse Darlu) and at the Sorbonne. In his novel In Search of Lost Time, Proust describes an existential experience of his character viewing these issues from a particular perspective, through the prism of the main character’s lifelong search of his calling. He gradually proceeds from philosophical psychology exploring the interaction of memories and impressions in a particular perception, to philosophy proper, to metaphysics aimed at understanding the truth, at going beyond time. The article traces some moments of this transition, shows that for Proust it is not just the work of memory that is important but the emphasis on those states of consciousness where the present and the past coincide, merge, and thereby we go beyond time, to eternity. The author analyzes some images and signs that accompanied the character of the novel on the way to the realization of his calling. Particular attention is paid to the Proustian interpretation of the role of art in changing and enriching the perception of the world, as well as the importance in human life of a habit in which positive and negative aspects are highlighted. Proust himself believed that a work of art is an optical instrument through which the readers begin to discern in themselves what they would otherwise fail to see. His own novel was such an instrument.

scholarly journals Imaginaire médiatique et dynamique du regard dans l’œuvre proustienne

1969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Carrier-Lafleur
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Xixe Siecle ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Xixe Siècle

Cet article propose d’analyser deux aspects majeurs, et pourtant méconnus, d’À la recherche du temps perdu : d’une part, celui d’« imaginaire médiatique », d’autre part, celui de « dynamique du regard ». Tous deux sont propres au XIXe siècle français, espace-temps d’inventions majeures pour notre modernité culturelle et artistique. Le texte proustien, un pied dans le XIEe siècle et l’autre dans le XXe, apparaît ainsi comme un catalyseur et comme un passeur. Le « temps retrouvé » de la Recherche, c’est aussi celui d’un XIXe siècle rendu sensible par le roman, médiatisé par l’œuvre. Le déploiement et la floraison de ces deux thématiques (la première questionnant la problématique de la mondanité et l’autre celle de l’imaginaire de l’œil et de la vision) seront relevés de façon générale dans la Recherche, puis on proposera deux études de cas ― sur le journal et sur la photographie ― qui viendront les illustrer.AbstractThis article proposes to analyze two major aspects of the novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time/Remembrance of things past), by Marcel Proust: on one hand, what is called “l’imaginaire médiatique”, on the other hand, “la dynamique du regard”. Both are specific to the 19th century in France, time and place of major inventions for our cultural and artistic modernity. The proustian novel, a foot in the 19th century and the other in the 20th, seems thus like a catalyst and a frontier runner. The “time regained” by In search of lost time is also that of the 19th century, precisely mediated by the novel. The deployment of these two sets of themes (the first questioning the problems of “mondanité” — social life, social network, social gossip and so on —, the second those of vision in a civilization of the eye) will be generally identified in the novel, after which two case studies (on newspapers and on photography) will be proposed to illustrate them.

scholarly journals LOVE IN ILANA TAN’S NOVEL AUTUMN IN PARIS

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-136
Author(s):  
Rizki Nurhidayah Sitompul ◽  
M. Manugeren ◽  
Purwarno Purwarno
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Love ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Qualitative Descriptive ◽  
Descriptive Method ◽  
Three Components

The research is concerned with types of love faced by Tara Dupont, the main character of the novel Autumn in Paris, written by Ilana Tan.  The types of love: friendship, infatuated love, romantic love and consummate love are the main focus of the study.  The objective is to find out how Tara Dupont implements the types of love in relationship with people around her. One of the theories used in the research is Robert Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love  which states that love has three components:  intimacy, passion and commitment  and these three components are to be applied to obtain or run real love.  Qualitative descriptive method is applied for the whole analysis.  The finding shows that types of love are found in the novel Autumn in Paris. Friendship appears in a relationship between Tara, Sebastien and Tatsuya. Romantic love and infatuated love are the dominant types of love and consummate love is the rarest. 

scholarly journals ‘Lettres de fuite’. Skrift og brud i À la recherche du temps perdu

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (73) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Watt
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Early Relationship ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Break Up

Adam Watt: “‘Lettres de fuite’: Writing and Rupture in In Search of Lost of Time”In Marcel Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time, the writing and sending of letters, their anticipation and receipt, are activities fuelled by desirous energies and fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. In this paper I consider a number of scenes in which the writing and sending of letters is prompted by the break-up or threatened rupture of an amorous relationship. The sending of missives is an activity bound up with attitudes to communication, otherness, and to futurity. These issues, the emotions they provoke and the epistemological schemes the protagonist develops to deal with them are at the heart of my paper. I compare how letters of rupture figure in the Narrator’s early relationship with Gilberte and in his later relations with Albertine. Exploring the nexus of concerns associated with writing and rupture in Proust’s novel provides an intriguing angle from which to review the Narrator’s relation to temporality and the ways in which Proust figures thought and emotion in the text of the novel.

Mirages and Mad Beliefs

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Prendergast
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Thought ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Writing Practice

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. This book 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. The book 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, the book 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.

scholarly journals Fare gli italiani dell’anno 3000

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Campani
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Italian Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
And Gender

In 1897 the Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza published The year 3000. A dream, a science fiction novel in which he described the future order of mankind through the journey of a couple. While recent historiography has focused on the eugenic elements of the book, this article discusses the social and gender matters that underpin the novel. Indeed, on the basis of the emotional paradigm of romantic love, Mantegazza put the ‘sexual reform’ of the post-unified Italy at the centre of his work. Believing that «love was the first instrument of progress», he aimed to show how under the guidance of science, humanity as well as Italian society would have a future of happiness and prosperity.

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