Christie McDonald

The association of ideas became the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis, informed the nascent semiology of Saussure, and characterized the literary works of Sterne, Joyce, Woolf, and especially Marcel Proust. The author of Remembrance of Things Past, acutely aware of how philosophical, historical, and narrative writing intersected, gave years of thinking and planning to his multivolume masterpiece. Its shape was protean. Each successive volume reconfigured the previous ones and in 1987 Proust readers welcomed the publication of several new editions, among them the Biblioth_que de la Pläiade, which presented as many pages of variants as of text. The Proustian Fabric engages the complex layers of association to be found in Proust's work. According to Christie McDonald, "Remembrance of Things Past straddles the dominant thinking patterns of two centuries: the nineteenth, inøwhich the association of fragmentary thought was to be subsumed into theønotion of a totality, and the twentieth, in which the notion of associative thinking was to move toward an infinite process of referral and interpretation." Imbued with McDonald's discerning knowledge of Proust's intellectual and historical milieu, his compendious writing and his critics, The Proustian Fabric is one of the first books to take into account the rich variations of the new editions and to reexamine certain suppositions about Proust's methods, as well as his concern with philosophy, literature, art, and politics.

Associations of Memory

The Proustian Fabric

The association of ideas became the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis, informed the nascent semiology of Saussure, and characterized the literary works of Sterne, Joyce, Woolf, and especially Marcel Proust. The author of Remembrance of Things Past, acutely aware of how philosophical, historical, and narrative writing intersected, gave years of thinking and planning to his multivolume masterpiece. Its shape was protean. Each successive volume reconfigured the previous ones and in 1987 Proust readers welcomed the publication of several new editions, among them the Biblioth�que de la Pl�iade, which presented as many pages of variants as of text. The Proustian Fabric engages the complex layers of association to be found in Proust's work. According to Christie McDonald, "Remembrance of Things Past straddles the dominant thinking patterns of two centuries: the nineteenth, in which the association of fragmentary thought was to be subsumed into the notion of a totality, and the twentieth, in which the notion of associative thinking was to move toward an infinite process of referral and interpretation." Imbued with McDonald's discerning knowledge of Proust's intellectual and historical milieu, his compendious writing and his critics, The Proustian Fabric is one of the first books to take into account the rich variations of the new editions and to reexamine certain suppositions about Proust's methods, as well as his concern with philosophy, literature, art, and politics.

Stanley Hoffmann

Debates about freedom, an ideal continually contested, were first set out in their modern version by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His ideas and analyses were taken up during the philosophical enlightenment, often invoked during the French Revolution, and still resonate in contemporary discussions of freedom. This volume examines Rousseau's many approaches to the concept of freedom, in the context of his thought on literature, religion, music, theater, women, the body, and the arts. Its expert contributors cross disciplinary frontiers to develop thought-provoking new angles on Rousseau's thought. By taking freedom as the guiding principle of their analysis, the essays form a cohesive account of Rousseau's writings.

Rousseau and Freedom

Debates about freedom, an ideal continually contested, were first set out in their modern version by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His ideas and analyses were taken up during the philosophical enlightenment, often invoked during the French Revolution, and still resonate in contemporary discussions of freedom. This volume, first published in 2010, examines Rousseau's many approaches to the concept of freedom, in the context of his thought on literature, religion, music, theater, women, the body, and the arts. Its expert contributors cross disciplinary frontiers to develop thought-provoking new angles on Rousseau's thought. By taking freedom as the guiding principle of their analysis, the essays form a cohesive account of Rousseau's writings.

To the extent that writing has long been considered a substitute for "living" conversation, dialogue has been a quintessential metaphor for language as communication. This volume closely analyzes dialogue, both as a literary genre and as a critical principle underlying the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot. In her analysis, the author examines relationships between texts and writers, between texts and readers, and between texts and other texts (intertextuality). Drawing extensively upon deconstructionist critical sources, as well as upon sociological and anthropological explorations of reading and writing, this volume provides valuable insight into the wonderfully complex acts of writing and reading, the "dialogue of writing." Of interest to students of eighteenth-century French literature, this work is alsoimportant to those interested in contemporary literary criticisms, its theory and practice, as well as to students of Barthes, Derrida, and Beneviste. The volume also presents fascinating applications of the the though of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Essays in Eighteenth-Century French Literature

The Dialogue of Writing

Susan Rubin Suleiman

Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.

A New Approach to Literary History

French Global

Susan Suleiman

François Proulx

Offers new perspectives on Proust's complex and creative relation to a variety of art forms from different eras.

Christie McDonald

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