Marcel Proust: A Study in the Quality of Awareness

by Edward J. Hughes

• ISBN13: 9780521155045
• ISBN10: 0521155045
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Proust's work may sometimes offer a picture of intellectual confidence. But not enough had previously been said about the crisis of hypersensitivity in many of Proust's characters. This 1983 book attempted to fill that gap, and as such should interest all students of Proust. In A la recherche, Proust deliberates on the separation between the troubled artist and the simple, sometimes primitive sensibility of others. It is a separation that many critics have viewed as inevitable. In this book, however, Dr Hughes shows that Proust is constantly exploring the divide, and finally succeeds in harmonising simplicity and complexity - in the unlikely form of music. In this way, several areas of Proust's novel are brought into prominence that would usually have been ignored - for example, his nostalgic depictions of animal life. This book provides a synthesis of these and related experiences: as such it offers a reappraisal of Proust's view of human awareness.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Preliminary notes

Introduction

Proust's early work

Beteween Jean Santeuil and A la recherche

The narrator's childhood and adolescence: formative influences

Characterisation: the functioning of a law of opposites

Albertine as captive of the narrator

The realisation of an artistic vocation

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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