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This study of Marcel Proust's creative imagination examines an aspect of the novel that has hitherto been largely overlooked: the author's dependence on secondary visual sources. Proust made constant use of reproductions - photographs, engravings, postcards, illustrations in books - as sources of reference and as narrative devices in their own right. Furthermore, he consistently chose to use reproductions in preference to originals, whether people, places or works of art. Bringing together for the first time a mass of factual information documenting Proust's use of second-hand images, the author argues that reproductions play a key role in the work's complex, multi-layered structure. Rather than being hampered by their limitations, Proust took advantage of their distancing effect to free his imagination and to insert new layers of meaning into his narrative.
List of contents
Contents: Proust's reliance on the reproduced image - The reproduction of art: real and fictional works of art in À la recherche du temps perdu - Proust and photography: portraits and imagery: The Narrator as collector and photographer - The photograph in the context of time, death and memory - The 'photographic' narrative techniques of À la recherche - The structural role of reproductions: The character of the reproduction as sign - The reproduction and metaphor.
About the author
The Author: Gabrielle Townsend read Modern Languages at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. After a career at a senior level in publishing she returned to academic study, gaining an M.A. in Cultural Memory at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, and then went on to complete a D.Phil. on Proust at Oxford University, supervised by Prof. Malcolm Bowie. She currently helps edit an academic journal and tutors Oxford undergraduates in French literature.
Report
«In this elegant book (with good reproductions of works of art used by Proust), Townsend has identified a gap in Proustian scholarship [...]. Little consideration has been given thus far to reproduced images and photography. [The book is] a timely critical contribution to the relation between the viewer and the visible [...].» (Nathalie Aubert, Journal of Romance Studies)
