Philosophy As Fiction

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199731101
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis Philosophy As Fiction by : Joshua Landy

Download or read book Philosophy As Fiction written by Joshua Landy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy as Fiction seeks to account for the peculiar power of philosophical literature by taking as its case study the paradigmatic generic hybrid of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. At once philosophical--in that it presents claims, and even deploys arguments concerning such traditionally philosophical issues as knowledge, self-deception, selfhood, love, friendship, and art--and literary, in that its situations are imaginary and its stylization inescapably prominent, Proust's novel presents us with a conundrum. How should it be read? Can the two discursive structures co-exist, or must philosophy inevitably undermine literature (by sapping the narrative of its vitality) and literature undermine philosophy (by placing its claims in the mouth of an often unreliable narrator)? In the case of Proust at least, the result is greater than the sum of its parts. Not only can a coherent, distinctive philosophical system be extracted from the Recherche, once the narrator's periodic waywardness is taken into account; not only does a powerfully original style pervade its every nook, overtly reinforcing some theories and covertly exemplifying others; but aspects of the philosophy also serve literary ends, contributing more to character than to conceptual framework. What is more, aspects of the aesthetics serve philosophical ends, enabling a reader to engage in an active manner with an alternative art of living. Unlike the "essay" Proust might have written, his novel grants us the opportunity to use it as a practice ground for cooperation among our faculties, for the careful sifting of memories, for the complex procedures involved in self-fashioning, and for the related art of self-deception. It is only because the narrator's insights do not always add up--a weakness, so long as one treats the novel as a straightforward treatise--that it can produce its training effect, a feature that turns out to be its ultimate strength.

How to Do Things with Fictions

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019518856X
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (951 download)

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Book Synopsis How to Do Things with Fictions by : Joshua Landy

Download or read book How to Do Things with Fictions written by Joshua Landy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-23 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does Mark's Jesus speak in parables? Why does Plato's Socrates make bad arguments? Why are Beckett's novels so inscrutable? And why don't stage magicians even pretend to summon spirits anymore? In a series of captivating chapters on Mark, Plato, Beckett, Mallarm , and Chaucer, Joshua Landy not only answers these questions but explains why they are worth asking in the first place. Witty and approachable, How to Do Things with Fictions challenges the widespread assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit. It reveals that authors are sometimes best thought of not as entertainers or as educators but as personal trainers of the brain, putting their willing readers through exercises designed to fortify specific mental capacities, from form-giving to equanimity, from reason to faith. Delivering plenty of surprises along the way--that moral readings of literature can be positively dangerous; that the parables were deliberately designed to be misunderstood; that Plato knowingly sets his main character up for a fall; that metaphor is powerfully connected to religious faith; that we can sustain our beliefs even when we suspect them to be illusions--How to Do Things with Fictions convincingly shows that our best allies in the struggle for more rigorous thinking, deeper faith, richer experience, and greater peace of mind may well be the imaginative writings sitting on our shelves.

The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139500236
Total Pages : 155 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (395 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust by : Adam Watt

Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust written by Adam Watt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27) changed the course of modern narrative fiction. This Introduction provides an account of Proust's life, the socio-historical and cultural contexts of his work and an assessment of his early works. At its core is a volume-by-volume study of In Search of Lost Time, which attends to its remarkable superstructure, as well as to individual images and the intricacies of Proust's finely-stitched prose. The book reaches beyond stale commonplaces of madeleines and memory, alerting readers to Proust's verbal virtuosity, his preoccupations with the fleeting and the unforeseeable, with desire, jealousy and the nature of reality. Lively, informative chapters on Proust criticism and the work's afterlives in contemporary culture provide a multitude of paths to follow. The book charges readers with the energy and confidence to move beyond anecdote and hearsay and to read Proust's novel for themselves.

Marcel Proust in Context

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107021898
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Marcel Proust in Context by : Adam Watt

Download or read book Marcel Proust in Context written by Adam Watt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging volume of essays provides an illuminating set of approaches to the multifaceted contexts of Proust's life and work.

Understanding Marcel Proust

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 161117256X
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (111 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Marcel Proust by : Allen Thiher

Download or read book Understanding Marcel Proust written by Allen Thiher and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Marcel Proust includes an overview of Marcel Proust's development as a writer, addressing both works published and unpublished in his lifetime, and then offers an in-depth interpretation of Proust's major novel, In Search of Lost Time, relating it to the Western literary tradition while also demonstrating its radical newness as a narrative. In his introduction Allen Thiher outlines Proust's development in the context of the political and artistic life of the Third Republic, arguing that everything Proust wrote before In Search of Lost Time was an experiment in sorting out whether he wanted to be a writer of critical theory or of fiction. Ultimately, Thiher observes, all these experiments had a role in the elaboration of the novel. Proust became both theorist and fiction writer by creating a bildungsroman narrating a writer's education. What is perhaps most original about Thiher's interpretation, however, is his demonstration that Proust removed his aged narrator from the novel's temporal flow to achieve a kind of fictional transcendence. Proust never situates his narrator in historical time, which allows him to demonstrate concretely what he sees as the function of art: the truth of the absolute particular removed from time's determinations. The artist that the narrator hopes to become at the end of the novel must pursue his own individual truths—those in fact that the novel has narrated, for him and the reader, up to the novel's conclusion. Written in a language accessible to upper-level undergraduates as well as literate general readers, Understanding Marcel Proust simultaneously addresses a scholarly public aware of the critical arguments that Proust's work has generated. Thiher's study should make Proust's In Search of Lost Time more widely accessible by explicating its structure and themes.

Philosophy of the Novel

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319658913
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (196 download)

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Book Synopsis Philosophy of the Novel by : Barry Stocker

Download or read book Philosophy of the Novel written by Barry Stocker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-02 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the aesthetics of the novel from the perspective of Continental European philosophy, presenting a theory on the philosophical definition and importance of the novel as a literary genre. It analyses a variety of individuals whose work is reflected in both theoretical literary criticism and Continental European aesthetics, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. Moving through material from eighteenth century and ancient Greek philosophy and aesthetics, the book provides comprehensive coverage of the major positions on the philosophy of the novel. Distinctive features include the importance of Vico’s view of the epic to understanding the novel, the importance of Kierkegaard’s view of the novel and irony along with his other aesthetic views, the different possibilities associated with seeing the novel as ‘mimetic’ and the importance of Proust in understanding the genre in all its philosophical aspects, relating the issue of the philosophical aesthetics of the novel with the issue of philosophy written as a novel and the interaction between these two alternative positions.

The Proustian Mind

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Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000790630
Total Pages : 735 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis The Proustian Mind by : Anna Elsner

Download or read book The Proustian Mind written by Anna Elsner and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Marcel Proust started to work on In Search of Lost Time in 1908, he wrote this question in his notebook: ‘Should I make it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?’ Throughout his famous multi-volume work, Proust directly engages several philosophers, and few novels are as thoroughly saturated with philosophical themes and concepts as In Search of Lost Time. The Proustian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the rich philosophical range of Proust’s work and the first major volume of its kind. Including 31 chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into seven clear parts: Proust’s life and works metaphysics and epistemology mind and language aesthetics ethics gender and sexuality predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Within these sections, key Proustian themes are explored from a philosophical standpoint, including time, the self, memory, imagination, jealousy, beauty, love, subjectivity and desire. The final section considers Proust in relation to important philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. The Proustian Mind is essential reading for those studying aesthetics, philosophy of literature, phenomenology and ethics, and will also be of interest to those in literature studying modernism, French literature and the relationship between literature and philosophy.

Proust's in Search of Lost Time

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190921579
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (99 download)

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Book Synopsis Proust's in Search of Lost Time by : Katherine Elkins

Download or read book Proust's in Search of Lost Time written by Katherine Elkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Unlike most fiction writers, Proust was trained in philosophy. In fact, he even considered writing a philosophical treatise instead of the novel we know so well. This hesitation about what form his writing should take still haunts his final choice of a novel, which is both philosophical, and yet, not philosophy. Take your pick of philosophers, from Plato to Nietzsche, and you can easily find an essay or even a book arguing that this particular philosopher most applies to Proust. But as one plunges into the narrative that he finally wrote, one is struck by the fact that In Search of Lost Time feels nothing like what we often call a philosophical novel, or even, a novel of ideas. Instead, philosophical reflection lies in the shadows of his fictional world, a sort of parallel life that can be found in the underweave"--

Narrative and Self-Understanding

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Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030282899
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (32 download)

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Book Synopsis Narrative and Self-Understanding by : Garry L. Hagberg

Download or read book Narrative and Self-Understanding written by Garry L. Hagberg and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained fact, as this applies to the understanding of our lives? When we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see may not just be a matter of identifying with a single protagonist, but also a matter of recognizing long-form structures, long-arc narrative shapes that give a place to – and thus make sense of – the individual bits of experience that we place into those structures. But of course at precisely this juncture a question arises: do we make that sense, or do we discover it? The twelve chapters brought together here lucidly and steadily reveal how the matters at hand are far more intricate and interesting than any such dichotomy could accommodate. This is a book that investigates the ways in which life and literature speak to each other.

Roberto Bolaño's Fiction

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231537530
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Roberto Bolaño's Fiction by : Chris Andrews

Download or read book Roberto Bolaño's Fiction written by Chris Andrews and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed by literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolaño's work into English, explores the singular achievements of the author's oeuvre, engaging with its distinct style and key thematic concerns, incorporating his novels and stories into the larger history of Latin American and global literary fiction. Andrews provides new readings and interpretations of Bolaño's novels, including 2666, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile, while at the same time examining the ideas and narrative strategies that unify his work. He begins with a consideration of the reception of Bolaño's fiction in English translation, examining the reasons behind its popularity. Subsequent chapters explore aspects of Bolaño's fictional universe and the political, ethical, and aesthetic values that shape it. Bolaño emerges as the inventor of a prodigiously effective "fiction-making system," a subtle handler of suspense, a chronicler of aimlessness, a celebrator of courage, an anatomist of evil, and a proponent of youthful openness. Written in a clear and engaging style, Roberto Bolano's Fiction offers an invaluable understanding of one of the most important authors of the last thirty years.

What Proust Heard

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226816680
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (268 download)

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Book Synopsis What Proust Heard by : Michael Lucey

Download or read book What Proust Heard written by Michael Lucey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-03-25 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Lucey offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. What happens when we talk? This deceptively simple question is central to Marcel Proust’s monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. Both Proust’s narrator and the novel that houses him devote considerable energy to investigating not just what people are saying or doing when they talk, but also what happens socioculturally through their use of language. Proust, in other words, is interested in what linguistic anthropologists call language-in-use. Michael Lucey elucidates Proust’s approach to language-in-use in a number of ways: principally in relation to linguistic anthropology, but also in relation to speech act theory, and to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. The book also includes an interlude after each of its chapters that contextualizes Proust’s social-scientific practice of novel writing in relation to that of a number of other novelists, earlier and later, and from several different traditions, including Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rachel Cusk. Lucey is thus able to show how, in the hands of quite different novelists, various aspects of the novel form become instruments of linguistic anthropological analysis. The result introduces a different way of understanding language to literary and cultural critics and explores the consequences of this new understanding for the practice of literary criticism more generally.

Proust Writing Photography

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351552902
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (515 download)

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Book Synopsis Proust Writing Photography by : Aine Larkin

Download or read book Proust Writing Photography written by Aine Larkin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The importance of vision and visual arts such as painting, theatre, and sculpture in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu has long been affirmed; another significant system of visual representation in the novel is photography. Proust appropriated photography as a practice with its own distinctive characteristics which could inform his writing about the processes of perception and memory. Through close textual analysis of scenes where photography is experienced or observed as a practice, and scenes where photography is written into the body of the text, Aine Larkin offers an invigorating new study that sheds genuinely new light on the presence of photographic motifs in Proust's novel, and the subtlety of Proust's engagement with this modern imaging system in his work.

Proust, the One, and the Many

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351192493
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (511 download)

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Book Synopsis Proust, the One, and the Many by : Erika Fulop

Download or read book Proust, the One, and the Many written by Erika Fulop and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the many aspects that make Marcel Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu such a complex and subtle work is its engagement with metaphysical questions. The disparate nature of the narrators experiences, hypotheses, and statements has generated a number of conflicting interpretations, based on parallels with the thought of one or another philosopher from Plato to Leibniz, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, or Deleuze. Through the analysis of the narrators two seemingly incompatible perceptions of the world, which reveal reality to be either one or infinitely multiple, Erika Fuelop proposes a reading of the novel that reconciles the opposites. Rather than being undecided or self-contradictory, the narrative thematizes the insufficiency of the dualist perspective and invites the reader to take a step beyond it. Erika Fuelop is an independent researcher, whose doctoral thesis completed at the University of Aberdeen is at the basis of this monograph."

Philosophy by Other Means

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Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022677094X
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis Philosophy by Other Means by : Robert B. Pippin

Download or read book Philosophy by Other Means written by Robert B. Pippin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout his career, Robert B. Pippin has examined the relationship between philosophy and the arts. With his writings on film, literature, and visual modernism, he has shown that there are aesthetic objects that cannot be properly understood unless we acknowledge and reflect on the philosophical concerns that are integral to their meaning. His latest book, Philosophy by Other Means, extends this trajectory, offering a collection of essays that present profound considerations of philosophical issues in aesthetics alongside close readings of novels by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J. M. Coetzee. The arts hold a range of values and ambitions, offering beauty, playfulness, and craftsmanship while deepening our mythologies and enriching the human experience. Some works take on philosophical ambitions, contributing to philosophy in ways that transcend the discipline’s traditional analytic and discursive forms. Pippin’s claim is twofold: criticism properly understood often requires a form of philosophical reflection, and philosophy is impoverished if it is not informed by critical attention to aesthetic objects. In the first part of the book, he examines how philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Adorno have considered the relationship between art and philosophy. The second part of the book offers an exploration of how individual artworks might be considered forms of philosophical reflection. Pippin demonstrates the importance of practicing philosophical criticism and shows how the arts can provide key insights that are out of reach for philosophy, at least as traditionally understood.

The World According to Proust

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197648681
Total Pages : 153 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (976 download)

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Book Synopsis The World According to Proust by : Joshua Landy

Download or read book The World According to Proust written by Joshua Landy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-11 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 100 years after Proust's death, In Search of Lost Time remains one of the greatest works in World Literature. At 3,000 pages, it can be intimidating to some. This short volume invites first-time readers and veterans alike to view the novel in a new way. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was arguably France's best-known literary writer. He was the author of stories, essays, translations, and a 3,000-page novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus in which Joshua Landy invites the reader to view the novel as a single quest-a quest for purpose, enchantment, identity, connection, and belonging- through the novel's fascinating treatments of memory, society, art, same-sex desire, knowledge, self-understanding, self-fashioning, and the unconscious mind. Landy also shows why the questions Proust raises are important and exciting for all of us: how we can feel at home in the world; how we can find genuine connection with other human beings; how we can find enchantment in a world without God; how art can transform our lives; whether an artist's life can shed light on their work; what we can know about the world, other people, and ourselves; when not knowing is better than knowing; how sexual orientation affects questions of connection and identity; who we are, deep down; what memory tells us about our inner world; why it might be good to think of our life as a story; how we can feel like a single, unified person when we are torn apart by change and competing desires. Finally, Landy suggests why it's worthwhile to read the novel itself-how the long, difficult, but joyous experience of making it through 3,000 pages of prose can be transformative for our minds and souls.

Art of the Everyday

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691127262
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Art of the Everyday by : Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Download or read book Art of the Everyday written by Ruth Bernard Yeazell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values. After showing how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike, Art of the Everyday turns to four major novelists--Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust--who strongly identified their work with Dutch painting. For all these writers, Dutch art provided a model for training themselves to look closely at the particulars of middle-class life. Yet even as nineteenth-century novelists strove to create illusions of the real by modeling their narratives on Dutch pictures, Yeazell argues, they chafed at the model. A concluding chapter on Proust explains why the nineteenth century associated such realism with the past and shows how the rediscovery of Vermeer helped resolve the longstanding conflict between humble details and the aspirations of high art.

The Art of Comics

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Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1444334646
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (443 download)

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Book Synopsis The Art of Comics by : Aaron Meskin

Download or read book The Art of Comics written by Aaron Meskin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-02-27 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE ART OF COMICS The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Introduction is the first-ever collection of essays published in English devoted to the philosophical questions raised by the art of comics. The volume, which includes a preface by the renowned comics author Warren Ellis, contains ten cutting-edge essays on a range of philosophical topics raised by comics and graphic novels. These include the definition of comics, the nature of comics genres, the relationship between comics and other arts such as film and literature, the way words and pictures combine in comics, comics authorship, the “language” of comics, and the metaphysics of comics. The book also contains an in-depth introduction by the co-editors which provides an overview of both the book and its subject, as well as a brief history of comics and an overview of extant work on the philosophy of comics. In an area of growing philosophical interest, this volume constitutes a great leap forward in the development of this fast expanding field, and makes a major contribution to the philosophy of art.