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| 2022/02/19 05:36:29瀏覽788｜回應0｜推薦7 | |
Excerpt：Writers: Their Lives and Works - Proust Explore the fascinating lives and loves of the greatest novelists, poets, and playwrights. From William Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison, Writers explores more than 100 biographies of the worlds greatest writers. Each featured novelist, playwright, or poet is introduced by a stunning portrait, followed by photography and illustrations of locations and artefacts important in their lives - along with pages from original manuscripts, first editions, and their correspondence. Trace the friendships, loves, and rivalries that inspired each individual and affected their writing, revealing insights into the larger-than-life characters, plots, and evocative settings that they created. You will also uncover details each writers most famous pieces and understand the times and cultures they lived in - see how the world influenced them and how their works influenced the world. Writers introduces key ideas, themes, and literary techniques of each figure, revealing the imaginations and personalities behind some of the worlds greatest novels, short stories, poems, and plays. A diverse variety of authors are covered, from the Middle Ages to present day, providing a compelling glimpse into the lives of the people behind the page. 【Excerpt】 Proust is renowned for a single novel, his seven-volume masterpiece In Search of Time Past, a profound meditation on memory, art, love, and loss, and a satirical portrayal of snobbery and sexual hypocrisy. Marcel Proust was born on 10 July 1871 in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil, where his family had taken refuge from the revolutionary Commune uprising that had rocked Paris the previous spring. His father was a distinguished professor of medicine, and his mother came from a cultured Jewish family. Elements in Prousts writing would display an analytic, diagnostic quality drawn from his paternal inheritance, but the dominant influence on his upbringing was his mothers warm humanism and her unquestioning respect for the value of art and literature. At the age of nine, Proust almost died from an asthma attack. For the rest of his life he would be defined as a semi-invalid. Apart from fulfilling a years military service, he never left his Parisian family home except for holidays. While his younger brother followed in his fathers footsteps, becoming a distinguished surgeon, Marcel indulged in the frivolous life of a socialite, cultured dilettante, and amateur litterateur. A sensuous Parisian environment-cafés and brothels, Impressionist art, and the Ballets Russes-formed Prousts refined aesthetic sensibility. His intelligence and taste earned him a place among the cultured elite, but apart from a number of essays and translations, he published nothing until the age of 42. Supported by his parents, he never worked for money. …… The work of a life When Proust offered the first volume, Swanns Way, to publishers in 1913 they were unimpressed; the book appeared only because the author agreed to pay all of the costs. The outbreak of World War I interrupted further publication, although Proust continued work on the novel in Paris. The second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, appeared in 1919 and won the prestigious literary prize the Prix Goncourt. Now famous, Proust worked feverishly at preparing the remaining volumes, but on 18 November 1922, persistent ill-health at last defeated him. The last volumes were published posthumously in an imperfect state without final revisions. In Search of Time Past has been described as a creative autobiography, a fictional recreation of the authors own life. The first-person narrator of the novel is not the author, but resembles him closely. Virtually every incident, location, and character in the book can be traced, at least in part, to a real-life original. The family servant, Francoise, one of the novels most complex characters, is recognizably related to Céleste Albaret, who served the author in his final years; Combray, the rural site of many of the narrators childhood experiences, is the village of llliers in northern France; Balbec, where the narrator spends seaside holidays, is the fashionable resort of Cabourg in Normandy; and so on. …… Memory and experience The novel has no plot in a strictly conventional sense: instead, an elaborate development of recurring themes and characters is held together by the narrators rich, metaphorical prose style. In Search of Time Past opens with a seminal event, a childs anxiety at being deprived of his mother at bedtime and an unexpected reprieve from this death-like separation. It is typical of Proust to endow such a minor event with heavy significance, yet carry it off with gentle charm and pathos. The imaginative force of Prousts evocation of early experiences and his exploration of memories has often dominated perceptions of the novel at the expense of the comedy of manners in status-ridden Parisian society that makes up so much of the book. Keenly observant and often very funny, the social element of the novel focuses on the "little clan" of the Verdurins, pretentious, middle-class bohemian social climbers, and the aristocratic Guermantes family, witty and elegant but made spiritually sterile by their adherence to a narrow set of values. Along with scenes of social life, the later parts of the novel focus on the narrators jealous love for Albertine. For Proust, sexual love is futile because the lovers emotions are fixated upon a person who does not exist, a figment created by their desire. There is no true relationship between the lover and the beloved. The only genuine pleasure lies in allaying the anxiety created by the beloveds absence. This bleak view of love is articulated in a long analysis that many readers regard as one of the novels regrettable excesses. In search of purpose The last volume returns to the theme of "involuntary memory" as a way of triumphing over the destructive effects of time. But for Proust it is clear that the ultimate victory over time comes less from memory than from the work of the creative artist. Some of the novels finest passages evoke the experiences of reading, listening to music, or looking at paintings, teasing out the reasons why these experiences are of such transcendent value. In the end, In Search of Time Past is about how the author/narrator comes to write In Search of Time Past, thereby achieving his spiritual purpose of redeeming lifes futility. ON STYLE The Proustian sentence Proust is particularly famous for his use of long, meandering sentences. The single longest example, which is found in Sodom and Gomorrah, totals a staggering 847 words. Although complex, the Proustian sentence-full of free-floating associations- is always perfectly grammatical and lucid. It makes severe demands upon the readers attention but allowed the author to indulge in sustained metaphors that expressed his belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of disparate elements of the world. Proust was able to produce detailed observations on his characters with this intricate prose. |
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| ( 知識學習｜隨堂筆記 ) |
