Marcel Proust The Fictions of Life and of Art [Paperback]

Leo Bersani is an eminent literary critic whose influential work spans half a century. His vast, in many ways unclassifiable, oeuvre has traversed and blurred the boundaries of the disciplines of modern French literature, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, art history, film theory, philosophical aesthetics, and masculinity studies and sexuality studies. Oxford University Press published Bersani's first book, on Proust, in 1965, but the work has long been out of print. This new edition comes in response to a recent renewal of interest among philosophers of literature, among others, and features a new preface from the author.

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One
Fantasies of the Self and the World
I. Je n'?tais plus qu'un coeur qui battait
II.Self-effacement and self-projection
III.The vulnerable self and its many deaths

Chapter Two
The Anguish and Inspiration of Jealousy
I.The mystery of other people's desires
II.Jealousy and the tortured imagination
III.Strategies to immobilize the ?tres de fuite, and les joies de la solitude
IV.From the lover's anguish to the novelist's possessions

Chapter Three
The Language of Love
I.The loved one's absence from the lover's desires
II.The self as an appareil vide : a critique of psychological analysis
III.The notes fondamentales from the perspective of memory: psychological analysis reinstated
IV.The monologue of love as a dialogue
V.The merging of fantasy and realism

Chapter Four
Social Contexts: Observation and Invention
I.The aristocracy's glamor
II.Society as a work of art: the poetry of the past
III.Reflections of Marcel's psychology in the social world
IV. Le royaume du n?ant
V.Variety of characterization and the general laws
VI.Marcel the character and Prousls@