The drama in the picture: Literary portraiture in James and Proust.
Item
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Title
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The drama in the picture: Literary portraiture in James and Proust.
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Identifier
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AAI9000737
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identifier
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9000737
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Creator
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van Slyck, Phyllis E.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Burton Pike
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Date
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1989
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, American | Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the interpretive role of pictorialism in Henry James and Marcel Proust. Pictorialism may be defined as the specific use of visual signals in narrative to create the verbal illusion of a picture. These two writers' use of pictorial technique is so pervasive and profound as to initiate a redefinition of drama in the novel through visual elements. As picture replaces story, it becomes the bearer of dramatic content.;In their use of pictorialism, Proust and James can be distinguished technically and thematically. The Jamesian picture is generally conceived within a closed frame, presented classically as a landscape, interior, or portrait. Dramatic development in James is also defined classically: it is a moment of heightened awareness or insight achieved visually. In contrast, the Proustian picture employs photographic and cinematic techniques, frequently subverting chronology in order to identify a subject as multiple, complex, and ahistorical. Dramatic content in Proust, while also emphasizing moments of heightened awareness, emphasizes, to a greater degree, ways that the viewer controls the shape and meaning of the picture.;For both James and Proust, the quest for knowledge depicted in their novels involves an imaginative reconstitution of reality, and, for both, the visual arts offer a method and a metaphor which enables them to dramatize the inner experience of a character who struggles to interpret the world. However, where Jamesian pictures are essentially dramatic distillations of life, gradually shorn of distortions imposed by the perceiver, Proustian images remain complex and subjective, insisting on the importance of the artist-perceiver's vision. James's pictorialism, therefore, may be said to be predominantly classical, though his use of the picture to explore the inner life of imagination and memory suggests his emergence into modernism. Proust's pictorialism reveals a more profound acceptance of complexity and contradiction as inherent in all knowledge and a belief in the responsibility of the perceiver to create meaning in the world.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
