![]() Second, Balbec is populated by Jewish residents. First, the town's name refers to the ancient city of Baalbek, located in what is now Lebanon. ![]() Proust's suggestion of Middle Eastern influences further distorts the idea of a singular French experience. ![]() For instance, when recalling his travels through the fictional French town of Balbec, he states, "These strangely ordinary and disdainfully familiar cathedrals cruelly stunned my unconsidered eyes and stabbed my homesick heart." Words such as "stun" and "stab" suggest the hostility the narrator feels from this French territory. As a result, the narrator becomes a stranger to, or is estranged from, his homeland, and lives the life of an exile. In his work, French cities are archaic and exotic. Proust describes France in ways that one would not expect. According to BenhaYm, memory functions within this text to re-configure both. More recently, scholars such as Andre BenhaYm have explored the relationship between Proust's treatment of memory and his representation of France and French culture. For Proust, involuntary memories are superior because they contain the spirit of the past in a way that voluntary memo-ries do not the former are more vivid, and they have the power to erase the temporal distance between the present moment and past experiences. Involuntary memory occurs through the stimulation of the senses, while voluntary memory is a deliberate effort to remember the past. For instance, Harold Bloom states that it is "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century." In addition to not-ing its length-it spans seven volumes and 3,200 pages-many commentaries have focused on Proust's treatment of two kinds of memory, involuntary and voluntary. Many scholars consider Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927) a significant literary achievement.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |