Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative after Proust: Prose Pictures and Fictional Recollection

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This book explores the relationship between ekphrasis and memory in the novel. Drawing on la recherche du temps perdu, Leonid Bilmes considers how Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith and Lydia Davis have employed and reshaped Prousts way of depicting the recollected past. In Ada, Austerlitz, 10:04, How to Be Both and The End of the Story, memory images are variously transposed into intermedial descriptions that inform the narrators story, just as they serve to shape the readers own remembrance of each of these narratives. Ekphrasis in the novel after Proust, Bilmes argues, acts as a distinct site within the text where past and present, self and other, image and text, seeing and hearing, are ever on the brink of reconciliation. The book surveys a wide field of critical inquiry, encompassing classical theorizations of ekphrasis, philosophical explorations of memory and visuality, as well as seminal studies of image-text relations by, among others, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jean-Luc Nancy and Liliane Louvel. Bilmess compelling dialogue with theory and literature evinces the underexplored bond between ekphrasis and memory in the contemporary novel.

Reviews

Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative After Proust explores the uses of ekphrasis, and develops the poetics of image/text in contemporary critical and literary work. The fair discussion of the main theories on the subject is developed in subtle close readings of works by Marcel Proust extended to contemporary novels. A highly readable book that will be a precious tool for future research. * Liliane Louvel, Emeritus professor of British literature, Poitiers University, France *
How do we remember In images, or in words In seeing, or in hearing Leonid Bilmes's compelling, fluent and sophisticated book responds to these conjoined questions by tracing the influence of Proust on a range of writers Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith and Lydia Davis all of whom think in what are here called prose pictures. What results is not only a fresh and elegant reading of this group of writers, but a bold new theory of the relation, in prose fiction, between remembering, looking and listening. * Peter Boxall, Professor of English, University of Sussex, UK *
Leonid Bilmess far-reaching study of how memorys elusive visions are captured in words takes Prousts In Search of Lost Time as its focus. It offers illuminating readings of Nabokov, Sebald, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith and Lydia Davis, resulting in an accomplished reflection on the theory and practice of mnemonic ekphrasis. * Emily Eells, Professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre, France *

Author Bio

Leonid Bilmes is an independent researcher based in Spain. His writing on contemporary literature and philosophy has appeared in Textual Practice, Philosophy Now and Los Angeles Review of Books. He has recently contributed a chapter to Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, a collection edited by Garry L. Hagberg.