by Dish Staff Does genre fiction act as a gateway to the hard stuff, to Woolf and Nabokov? Tim Parks challenges the conventional wisdom behind the “‘I-don’t-mind-people-reading-Twilight-because-it could-lead-to-higher-things’ platitude”: [W]hy do the right-thinking intellectuals continue to insist on this idea, even encouraging their children to read anything rather than nothing, as if the very act … Continue reading From Pulp To Proust?
Daniel Mendelsohn recalls how reading the author for the first time transformed his ideas of love and writing: Discovering Proust was a real shock—it was the shock of recognition. I was twenty, and going through a rough patch in my love life. It gave me a shock that, I believe, is felt by every gay … Continue reading The Shock Of Proust
Pico Iyer argues that Proust was an “accidental Buddhist,” quoting from Within a Budding Grove to illustrate his point: “We do not receive wisdom,” [the painter] Elstir tells the narrator (who has just realized that “this man of genius, this sage” is a “foolish, corrupt little painter” in another context), “we must discover it for … Continue reading The Dharma Of Proust?
One hundred years ago this week, Proust published Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Richard Lea ruminates on what draws Proust aficionados back to the seven-volume novel again and again: The memories that the narrator recalls over the course of … Continue reading Remembrance Of Things Proust
A shocking revelation: The thing is: There’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that Proust really ate madeleines. Although his vivid memories of the delicate cookies from In Search of Lost Time have become iconic, early versions of the novel actually don’t include madeleines at all. Instead, we see Marcel biting into humble biscotte … Continue reading The Proustian Diet
Morgan Meis urges you to approach Marcel Proust’s writing without a rigid interpretive scheme, letting his beautiful prose carry you along: The entire structure of Remembrance of Things Past, insofar as it has a structure, is meant to create a loose scaffolding for these incredible sentences, for these moments when Proust burrows his prose deepest into … Continue reading Proust Without Presuppositions
The just released translation of Marcel Proust’s collected poetry includes his first known attempt at verse, “Pederasty,” written when he was 17. Harold Augenbraum, the volume’s editor, notes that it reveals him to be “struggling with his homosexual urges”: Proust’s sexuality was a matter of public discussion even during his lifetime, but this poem and … Continue reading Proust’s Young Love
They both think you're being a baby for bitching about your phone.
John Horton has started an automated crowd-written blog called Mechanical Proust. Contributors answer basic questions taken from the Proust Questionnaire. They are paid by Amazon Mechanical Turk, an "online market where people perform simple tasks for pennies, like labeling photos, though more recently, social scientists are using it to do online experiments." Horton learned: Most of the … Continue reading Mechanical Proust
A "He-Man" fan remembers his temps perdu.
