Literary text and ideology in the writings of the young Marcel Proust (1887--1900).
Item
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Title
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Literary text and ideology in the writings of the young Marcel Proust (1887--1900).
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Identifier
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AAI9959220
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identifier
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9959220
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Creator
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Rosengarten, Frank.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Mary Ann Caws
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Date
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2000
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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, Romance | Biography
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Abstract
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The main purpose of this dissertation is to elucidate the relations between Proust's early fictional and critical writings and the evolution of his ideas concerning art, society, and politics. To accomplish this task, the dissertation attempts to do the following: (1) establish a theoretical framework for the ideological criticism of literature in general, while at the same time, especially in chapter two, examining a series of critical studies of Proust in which ideological questions have been given prominent attention. (2) situate the writings of young Proust in their socio-historical context, emphasizing various literary, artistic, and philosophical currents from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries that exerted an important influence on Proust. (3) review the philological and internal textual problems that present themselves in the analysis of such works as Les Plaisirs et les jours and Jean Santeuil, both of which (or parts of which) have appeared in a variety of guises and have undergone significant editorial interventions resulting in noteworthy differences of format, style, and order of presentation. (4) connect the literary critical principles which young Proust elaborated in the 1880s and 1890s with his fictional and poetic writings during the years 1892 to 1900.;Essentially, the dissertation argues that Proust's youthful writings are not ideologically innocent. On the contrary, they are in many respects typical expressions of a widespread idealist reaction in the late nineteenth century to what was perceived, by the educated bourgeois class to which Proust belonged, to be the intolerable encroachments of positivist thought into the literary world, and the spectre of a new militant materialism among the working classes. Proust was a representative of an aesthetisizing intelligentsia that saw art as the sole means of enlightenment and liberation. Yet he was more than that, and one of the burdens of this dissertation is to explain the attributes of character, mind and vision that set him apart from his generation.;In sum, the dissertation combines elements of an intellectual biography with those of a social literary analysis.
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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.
