Year: 2005
By: Daniel Karlin
Genre: literary criticism, monograph
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN-10: 0199256888
ISBN-13: 978-0199256884
English language
Format: DjVu
Interactive table of contents: Yes
Number of Pages: 241
English is the "second language" of A la recherche du temps perdu. Although much has been written about Proust's debt to English literature, especially Ruskin, Daniel Karlin is the first critic to focus on his knowledge of the language itself--on vocabulary, idiom, and etymology. He uncovers an "English world" in Proust's work, a world whose social comedy and artistic values reveal surprising connections to some of the novel's central preoccupations with sexuality and art. Anglomanie--the fashion for all things English--has been as powerful a presence in French culture as hostility to perfide Albion; Proust was both subject to its influence, and a brilliant critic of its excesses. French resistance to imported English words remains fierce to this day; but Proust's attitude to this most contentious aspect of Anglo-French relations was marked by his rejection of concepts of national and racial "purity," and his profound understanding of the necessary "impurity" of artistic creation.
List of Illustrations
Note on Texts and Translations
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Proust's English World
Anglomanie
For what fault have you most toleration?
'Je ne pretends pas savior l'anglais.'
'I do not speak french'
Le livre des snobs
2. Swann and Odette
Enter Swann(s)
'La dame en rose'
Odette's smarts
Odette orchidophile. Odette orchidee
Odette en fleurs
Swann's way with words
'C'est bien ce qu'on appelle un gentleman?'
L'israelite du Jockey
'D'origine anglaise
3. Choses Normandes
Balbec as found
La Grand-Hotel de Balbec-Cabourg
Le sport
The painter of modern life
4. Les Mots retrouves
Un englische; un English
Du pur vocabulaire
Qu'est-ce que l'Anglais?
Etymology and deformation
Un arriviste digne de louange
Appendix: The Location of English Words and Phrases in A la recherche du temps perdu
List of Works Cited
Index
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