The Philosophy Class

2020 ◽  
Vol 111 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-439
Author(s):  
Michael Wood
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Involuntary Memory

Abstract Even as a schoolboy Marcel Proust specialized in thoughts of loss and doubt, and in À la recherche du temps perdu, he puts these thoughts to a very particular kind of philosophical work: the cultivation of epistemological (and other) errors that are certainly errors but are in some sense not entirely wrong. A noise is misinterpreted, attributed to an incorrect source, but Proust’s narrator, while scrupulously revising the perception, allows his first take a sort of magical afterlife. This effect is subtly developed in the last volume of the novel, where the narrator completes the experiences of involuntary memory that ground his whole theory of regained time—and also has experiences that contradict the theory, that show time to be ever-elapsing, impossible to regain. He doesn’t endorse the contradiction, and he doesn’t give up his theory. But he doesn’t erase the contradiction either.

scholarly journals The geometry of artistic space in the works by Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 165-169
Author(s):  
Alexander N. Taganov
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Main Role ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Involuntary Memory ◽  
Structural Organisation ◽  
Principle Of Relativity ◽  
Special Geometry ◽  
French Writer ◽  
Temporal Moments

The article considers the peculiarities of the artistic system in the works by the French writer of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, VLGE Marcel Proust. The foundations of his aesthetic views, which are manifested primarily at the level of the structural organisation in the novel cycle “In Search of Lost Timeˮ are studied. The specificity of the narrative, where the main role is played by involuntary memory, allows us to speak about the special geometry of the artistic space in this work. It happens due to Proust's rejection of “plane psychologyˮ in favour of “psychology in time”. It is shown how on such a basis, thanks to the mnemonic mechanism, a complex connection of spontaneously arising spatial fragments with the temporal moments of existence arises and the chronotopic structure of the novel, built on the principle of relativity, is constructed where time becomes, in fact, the fourth dimension of space.

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.

Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772–1801)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Bowie
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Friedrich Schleiermacher ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Friedrich Schlegel ◽  
Philosophical Work

Novalis (the name is a pseudonym adopted for his published writings) was, together with Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the leading philosophical thinker of ‘early German Romanticism’. Until recently Novalis was regarded primarily as a poet and as the author of the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, who wrote some philosophical work in conjunction with his writings on natural science and on the political matters of his day. In the wake of the renewed philosophical interest in the philosophy of J.G. Fichte and other German idealist thinkers, there has been a reassessment of the writings of both Schlegel and Novalis. It is now apparent that, far from being, as most commentators present them, defenders of Fichte’s ‘subjective idealism’, Novalis and Schlegel arrived at significant criticisms of Fichte’s idealism and initiated an anti-foundationalist tendency in modern philosophy which still has significant resonances today.

Proust Confirmed by Neurosurgery

PMLA ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Total Recall ◽  
Montreal Neurological Institute ◽  
Involuntary Memory ◽  
The Mind

Marcel Proust stated clearly and repeatedly in his vast A la recherche du temps perdu his determining theory of involuntary memory. Proust's entire work was based upon experiences of total recall from a store of memories unconsciously preserved in the mind. In a paper delivered in 1957 by Dr. Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute are to be found physiological bases for Proust's esthetic experiences. Wilder reported that forgotten experiences were revealed to patients in great detail when electrodes were applied to various parts of their brains. Penfield thus supports Proust's view of a stream of memories (or, as Penfield calls it, a continuous filmstrip) preserving an individual's total experiential responses from childhood onward. The juxtaposition of Proust's statements with those of the neurosurgeon about the nature of this stream of unconscious memories, their relation to conscious memory, and the conditions under which they are recalled throws light upon the validity of Proust's technique.

scholarly journals Dominando a imagem: funções da pintura na narrativa

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Sophie Bertho
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Production Level ◽  
The Novel

<p>  Este artigo tem por objetivo examinar as referências ao pictural na literatura e, especialmente, definir as funções da presença do quadro de pintura na narrativa. Com base na obra de Marcel Proust, <em>À la Recherche du temps perdu</em>, são analisadas as referências à pintura para se definir quatro tipos de função: psicológica, retórica, estrutural e ontológica, que são exemplificadas com excertos de Proust e comparadas a outras obras da literatura francesa. Conclui-se que as diferentes funções que a referência ao pictural exerce em um romance se distinguem por operarem no nível da recepção ou da produção, sendo que a função ontológica, a mais complexa, ultrapassa essa distinção e atinge o metadiscurso, revelando em uma outra arte, a pintura, a essência da arte primeira, a literatura.   </p><p>This essay investigates the pictorial references in literature and especially defines the role of the presence of paintings in the narrative. These pictorial references are analyzed in order to define four types of functions: psychological, rhetorical, structural and ontological, which are exemplified with Proust excerpts and compared to other works of French literature. The different functions of the pictorial references are operating in the novel at reception or production level, and by Proust the ontological function, more complex, beyond this distinction reaches metadiscourse, revealing in another art, painting, the essence of the first art, literature.  </p>

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.

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.

Die Bedeutung des Gelesenen: Eine komparatistische Studie über Rainer Maria Rilke und Marcel Proust

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-211
Author(s):  
Maria Slavtscheva
Keyword(s):  
Hierarchical Model ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Rainer Maria Rilke ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
French Author ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract The article discusses the hierarchical model of readers’ types outlined by Marcel Proust in his essay “Journées de lecture” and reconstructs Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetics of reading in accordance with the poems “Der Lesende” and “Der Leser” as well as the thematic relevant parts of the novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Based on the conclusions made thereby, it draws attention to the possibilities arising from a comparative reading of the description of the scene in which the young Marcel reads in the garden of Combray from Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, and Rilke’s poem “Hebend die Blicke vom Buch”. Moreover, it is shown that in this short but complex poem, the German poet fulfills the ideal of a unity of reading and writing emphasized by the French author. Combining the motive of looking away from the book typical of his prose and poetry with Proust’s typical motive of the memory of a certain read, Rilke brings into being a poetic picture of reading, which triggers both the memory and the reflection, and an image of a reader that reveals his own productive reception.

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