Marcel Proust In The Light Of William James
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Marcel Proust in the Light of William James
Author: Marilyn M. Sachs
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Release Date: 2013-11-29
For a century now, scholars have searched for the “source” of Marcel Proust’s startlingly innovative novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Some have pointed to Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, or Paul Sollier. Others have referenced the novels of Henry James. But no one has focused on the more significant influence of the writings of Henry’s older brother, the psychologist and Harvard professor William James. A close comparison reveals the degree to which Proust’s novel stems from James’s psychological and philosophical theories. William James was a prominent member of the scientific, medical and philosophical communities in Proust’s Paris and was close friends with two men well known to Proust. His works were translated into French and reviewed in French journals and newspapers. This book discloses how Proust likely became familiar with William James and illustrates how James’s writings were key to Proust’s ability to craft the book he had been trying to write, extending even to his use of similar language and imagery and a narrative schema that arguably mimics James’s descriptions of consciousness, perception, and memory. Proust’s hero assiduously explores the vague, uncertain, relational aspects of experience, the trials and comforts of habit, the salvational potential of memory, the “moral” aspects of personal history teeming with impression and desire—these are the truths of human psychology and behavior theorized by William James and made fictional flesh in Proust’s rendition of lived experience.
The Proustian Mind
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.
Humanism, Antitheodicism, and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion
Author: Sami Pihlström
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Release Date: 2023-03-20
Humanism, Antitheodicism, and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion develops a distinctive approach to pragmatist philosophy of religion, and more generally to pragmatist investigations of the human search for meaning, by emphasizing what may be considered two closely interrelated main features of this tradition: humanism and antitheodicism. Humanism here emphasizes the need to focus on religion as a human practice within human concerns of meaningfulness and significance, as distinguished from any metaphysical search for cosmic meaning. Antitheodicism, in turn, stands for the refusal to accept any justification, divine or secular, for the experiences of meaninglessness that individuals undergoing horrendous suffering may have. Developing a critical form of pragmatism emphasizing these ideas, Sami Pihlström explores the relations between pragmatism and analytic philosophy in the philosophy of religion, especially regarding the question of religious meaning, as well as the significance of literature for philosophy of religion, with particular emphasis on William James's pragmatism.