Overview
- Draws together a range of disciplines, including Philosophy, Musicology, and Literary Studies to explore Proust's work
- Provides a fresh new approach to Proust's much-studied novel
- Offers a unique argument against received opinion that music is linked to absolute truth in Proust
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature (PMEL)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book is about reading Proust’s novel via philosophical and musicological approaches to “modern” listening. It articulates how insights into the way we listen to and understand classical music inform the creation of literary meaning. It asks: are we to take at face value the ideas about art that the novel contains, or are those part of the fiction? Is there a difference between what the novel says and what it does, and how can music provide a key to answering that question? According to this study, Proust asks us to temporalize our interpretation by recognizing the distance between initial and final experiences of the novel, and by being open to the ways in which it challenges attempts at interpretive closure. Proust’s novel responds to the kind of attentive and eternally changing perspectives that can be generated from music and our attempts to make sense of it.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. His books include French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music (2006), Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature (2012), The Fall out of Redemption (2015), and the edited volume Thinking Poetry (2013).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Proust, Music, and Meaning
Book Subtitle: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche
Authors: Joseph Acquisto
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47641-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-47640-7Published: 10 March 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-83789-5Published: 03 May 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-47641-4Published: 28 February 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6478
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6486
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 215
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, European Literature, Fiction