Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative after Proust

Prose Pictures and Fictional Recollection

Leonid Bilmes (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

256 Seiten

2023
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-350-33683-4 (ISBN)

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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.

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.

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

Erscheinungsdatum	22.12.2022
Zusatzinfo	10 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-350-33683-1 / 1350336831
ISBN-13	978-1-350-33683-4 / 9781350336834
Zustand	Neuware