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Zusatztext This incredibly and singularly brave analysis of writings on Proust is, as I lift its last word, truly “far-seeing.” Compelling in its awareness, its energeiac espousal of critical engagement with narrational watching as hearing, the intermediality Bilmes practices seems to leave out no one we care about thinking with: Benjamin, Derrida, Blanchot, Barthes, Ricoeur, and on. Way on. Informationen zum Autor 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. Vorwort Exploring the relationship between narrative, memory and ekphrasis in modern and contemporary fiction after Proust, this book considers how W.G. Sebald, Vladimir Nabokov, Ali Smith, Lydia Davis and Ben Lerner have employed and reshaped Proust’s way of depicting memory in their fiction. Zusammenfassung This book explores the relationship between ekphrasis and memory in the novel. Drawing on À 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 Proust’s 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 narrator’s story, just as they serve to shape the reader’s 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. Bilmes’s compelling dialogue with theory and literature evinces the underexplored bond between ekphrasis and memory in the contemporary novel. Inhaltsverzeichnis List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: On seeing prose pictures 1 Proust’s way: Ekphrasis, memory, narrative 2 After Proust: By way of ironized nostalgia 3 Description and narration in Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor 4 Narration’s looming of the archive in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz 5 Retrospect, prospect and the fiction of the face in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 6 Commemoration via intermedial lamination in Ali Smith’s How to be both 7 Writing forgetting in Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story Conclusion Works Cited Index...
