Proust Pastiche And The Postmodern Or Why Style Matters
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Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern or Why Style Matters
Author: James F. Austin
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Release Date: 2013-08-28
Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern, or Why Style Matters argues against the traditional view that Marcel Proust wrote pastiches, that is, texts that imitate the style of another author, to master his literary predecessors while sharpening his writerly quill. On the contrary, James F. Austin demonstrates that Proust’s oeuvre, and In Search of Lost Time in particular, deploy pastiche to other ends: Proust’s pastiches, in fact, “do things with words” to create powerful real-world effects. His works are indeed performative acts that forge social relationships, redefine our ideas of literature, and even work against oppressive political and economic discourses. Building on the “speech-act” theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller, and on the postmodern theory of Fredric Jameson, this book not only elucidates the performative nature of pastiche, but also shows that the famous “Goncourt” pastiche from In Search of Lost Time has attracted so much attention because it already attained the postmodern; that is, it eliminated temporal depth and experience, transforming time itself into a nostalgic style of an era, and into the sort of aestheticized surface that came to define postmodernism decades later. To reflect this transformation of pastiche, this work rearticulates its history in France around Proust. Reconfiguring a scholastic, classically-inspired pedagogical tradition based on imitation, and breaking with the dominant satirical practice, Proust’s work opened up possibilities in the twentieth century for a new kind of pastiche: playful and performative in the literary field, and postmodern in a French cinema that, as with the Goncourt pastiche, represents time as the visual style of an era, whether unreflexively in “heritage” films such as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, or discerningly in Eric Rohmer’s Lady and the Duke, which uses period pictorial and painterly conventions to illustrate how the representation of history onscreen typically flattens time into style.
Reading Revelation as Pastiche
Author: Michelle Fletcher
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2017-05-18
Scholars have often read the book of Revelation in a way that attempts to ascertain which Old Testament book it most resembles. Instead, we should read it as a combined and imitative text which actively engages the audience through signalling to multiple texts and multiple textual experiences: in short, it is an act of pastiche. Fletcher analyses the methods used to approach Revelation's relationship with Old Testament texts and shows that, although there is literature on Revelation's imitative and multi-vocal nature, these aspects of the text have not yet been explored in sufficient depth. Fletcher's analysis also incorporates an examination of Greco-Roman imitation and combination before providing a better way to understand the nature of the book of Revelation, as pastiche. Fletcher builds her case on four comparative case studies and uses a test case to ascertain how completely they fit with this assessment. These insights are then used to clarify how reading Revelation as imitative and combined pastiche can challenge previous scholarly assumptions, transforming the way we approach the text.
Vikram Seth’s Poetics of Pastiche
Vikram Seth is a critical enigma. He is recognized as one of the most important Indian Anglophone authors of his generation; his individual works have been widely reviewed, yet his work has rarely been approached as a whole and remains surprisingly understudied. Perhaps the chief reason for the paucity of critical response to the full compass of Seth’s work is his disregard for intellectual fashion. Indeed, Seth is at once very popular and deliberately unfashionable. His literary affiliations are conservative; seemingly uninterested in any revisionary narrative, he is equally unconcerned by the interpenetration of cultures in our globalized world, representing assimilation rather than cultural difference. He defies the expectations of both postcolonial and world literature; therefore, to discuss his critical neglect is to shed light on the limitations of these labels. As the most thorough attempt to map a general poetics in Seth’s work, this study – the first of its kind on this writer– develops a new critical methodology to capture the nuances of Seth’s literary strategies. It provides scholars and students insight into the key features of Seth’s work and uncovers a consistent authorial strategy running through his seemingly disconnected body of work, namely a systematic use of intertextual practices.