Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative after Proust: Prose Pictures and Fictional Recollection

by Leonid Bilmes

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350336872
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/25/2024
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative After Proust explores the uses of ekphrasis, and develops the poetics of image/text in contemporary critical and literary work. The fair discussion of the main theories on the subject is developed in subtle close readings of works by Marcel Proust extended to contemporary novels. A highly readable book that will be a precious tool for future research.” —Liliane Louvel, Emeritus professor of British literature, Poitiers University, France

“How do we remember? In images, or in words? In seeing, or in hearing? Leonid Bilmes's compelling, fluent and sophisticated book responds to these conjoined questions by tracing the influence of Proust on a range of writers – Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith and Lydia Davis – all of whom think in what are here called 'prose pictures'. What results is not only a fresh and elegant reading of this group of writers, but a bold new theory of the relation, in prose fiction, between remembering, looking and listening.” —Peter Boxall, Professor of English, University of Sussex, UK

“Leonid Bilmes's far-reaching study of how memory's elusive visions are captured in words takes Proust's In Search of Lost Time as its focus. It offers illuminating readings of Nabokov, Sebald, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith and Lydia Davis, resulting in an accomplished reflection on the theory and practice of mnemonic ekphrasis.” —Emily Eells, Professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre, France

“This incredibly and singularly brave book is, as I lift its last word, truly “far-seeing.” Compelling in its awareness, its energeiac espousal of critical engagement with narrational watching as hearing, the intermediality Bilmes practices seems to leave out no one we care about thinking with: Benjamin, Derrida, Blanchot, Barthes, Ricoeur, and on. Way on.” —Mary Ann Caws, Professor Emirita of Comparative Literature, English, and French, University of New York, USA

From the Publisher