Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life: Ravaisson, Bergson, and Simmel

Suzanne Guerlac

nov 2020 · Bloomsbury Publishing

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Through an engagement with the philosophies of Proust's contemporaries, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel, Suzanne Guerlac presents an original reading of Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu). Challenging traditional interpretations, she argues that Proust's magnum opus is not a melancholic text, but one that records the dynamic time of change and the complex vitality of the real.

Situating Proust's novel within a modernism of money, and broadening the exploration through references to cultural events and visual technologies (commercial photography, photojournalism, pornography, the regulation of prostitution, the Panama Scandal, and the Dreyfus Affair), this study reveals that Proust's subject is not the esthetic recuperation of loss but rather the adventure of living in time, on both the individual and the social level, at a concrete historical moment.

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Suzanne Guerlac is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century literature, literature and philosophy and contemporary cultural criticism. Her publications include Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton; "La Transgression et le rêve de la théorie" in De Tel Quel à L'Infini; and "Maurice Barrès et la poétique de l'Identité" in Revue des Sciences Humaines (2000).