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

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Through an engagement with the philosophies of Prousts contemporaries, Flix 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 Prousts magnum opus is not a melancholic text, but one that records the dynamic time of change and the complex vitality of the real. Situating Prousts 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 Prousts 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.

Reviews

The sensual prose of Suzanne Guerlac brings new life to Remembrance, grounded in a fascinating history of photographic art and creating unexpected connections with philosophers of the time. In an innovative way, Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life uses images to illustrate how the novelist draws his ideas from places where critics didnt think to look:business cards, blurry snapshots, photographs of coins, pornographic images An intellectually subversive, and exhilarating book. * Anne Simon, Director of Research, The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France *
In this masterful book, Suzanne Guerlac not only challenges how we read Proust (already an ambitious task), she provides a new and convincing framework for understanding photography. Eschewing the by-now conventional references to Barthes and Benjamin, Guerlac asks us to rediscover the overlooked philosophers from Prousts era: Ravaisson, Bergson, and Simmel. * Patrick M. Bray, Associate Professor of French, University College London, UK *

Author Bio

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, Valry, Breton; "La Transgression et le rve de la thorie" in De Tel Quel L'Infini; and "Maurice Barrs et la potique de l'Identit" in Revue des Sciences Humaines (2000).