Mourning and Creativity in Proust
This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tributeto those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.

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Mourning and Creativity in Proust
This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tributeto those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.

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Mourning and Creativity in Proust

Mourning and Creativity in Proust

by Anna Magdalena Elsner
Mourning and Creativity in Proust

Mourning and Creativity in Proust

by Anna Magdalena Elsner

Hardcover(1st ed. 2017)

$109.99 
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Overview

This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tributeto those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781137603302
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date: 03/14/2017
Series: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism
Edition description: 1st ed. 2017
Pages: 249
Product dimensions: 5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Anna Magdalena Elsner is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of French and the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London, UK. She completed her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Melancholia's Afterlives.- Chapter 1: Time of death: Alterity.- Chapter 2: Mourning and the Uncanny Space.- Chapter 3: The Ethics of Creation.- Epilogue: Fidelity to the Intermittences.
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