Mirages and Mad Beliefs (ebook)

Argumento de Mirages and Mad Beliefs (ebook)

"Prendergast . . . has produced a study that makes readers want to take a fresh look at the work--perhaps the best accomplishment for literary criticism."--Edward Ousselin, French Review

"[A] deliciously rich interrogation of the French novelist's oeuvre. . . . Prendergast has baked a millefeuille of a book here, crisp, rich and multilayered. Read it for its exposition of jokes, of magic, enchantment and spectrality, of the Proustian body (a place 'where we live but not where we are at home'), as well as for its awkward questions. Refusing to treat Proust as a celebrant, this book interrogates his gloriously mad project, while also amply fulfilling its intention to 'stay alert, with one of the most alert minds of modern literature.'"--Mary Bryden, Times Higher Education

"From Bergson to Sebald, Prendergast's new book demonstrates his brilliant reach. Delving into the smallest details and largest ideas, as well as Proust's own 'truth written with the aid of figures,' this investigation of his skeptic perspective is as deep as it is wide."--Mary Ann Caws, author of Marcel Proust

"Christopher Prendergast extracts new and original meanings out of the best-known pages in Proust. This is the rewarding upshot of close and perspicuous readings that reveal ambiguities and paradoxes in passages whose interpretations are often taken for granted. Prendergast's admiration, far from blinding him, leads to his discovering the strength in Proust's loose ends."--Antoine Compagnon, Collège de France and Columbia University

"Through exemplary close reading and remarkable attention to textual detail, this book offers a high-powered critical argument that essentially pits Proust against himself--the romantic aesthete against the ironic doubter, the writer who conquers time against the one who understands how thoroughly lost it can be. This work will challenge and alter many current readings of Proust and, by implication, other writers."--Michael Wood, Princeton University

"In Mirages and Mad Beliefs, Prendergast identifies a skeptical strain in Proust's writing marking the novelist's resistance to his own apparent beliefs. This is the work of a major critic at the top of his game: witty, profound, and highly readable, while meeting top standards of scholarship in its display of erudition and respect for sources. It deserves to be widely read."--Michael Sheringham, University of Oxford

Winner of the 2015 R. Gapper Prize, Society for French Studies0Acknowledgments vii
References and Abbreviations ix

CHAPTER ONE Mad Belief 1
CHAPTER TWO Proustian Jokes 29
CHAPTER THREE Magic 60
CHAPTER FOUR Éblouissement 84
CHAPTER FIVE What's in a Comma? 104
CHAPTER SIX Walking on Stilts 130
CHAPTER SEVEN Bodies and Ghosts 161
CHAPTER EIGHT The Citizen of the Unknown Homeland 189

Index 217