Mourning and Creativity in Proust [Hardcover]

This study explores Prousts answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novels final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tribute to those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Prousts novel captivating for readers since its publication. 

Introduction: Melancholia's Afterlives

Chapter 1: Time of death: Alterity

Chapter 2: Mourning and the Uncanny Space

Chapter 3: The Ethics of Creation

Epilogue: Fidelity to the Intermittences

Anna Magdalena Elsner is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of French and the Centre for the Humanities and Health at Kings College London, UK. She completed her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, UK.

This study explores Prousts answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historlƒA