SEEING IMPOSSIBLE THINGS: PROUST AND THE READER’S VISUAL IMAGINATION
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Bruhn, Maury
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Romance Studies
- Abstract
- My dissertation examines how literature prompts us to visualize complex, multisensory and multidimensional images that push the boundaries of our cognitive capacities. Rather than considering descriptive power in literature in terms of perceptual mimesis, I argue that the imaginative challenges posed by literary images help us think outside of the habitual conceptual constructs that structure our normal perception of the world around us. Taking Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) as a case study, I investigate how Proust guides the reader to visualize certain sets of objects: food and other mealtime accoutrements, seascapes and skies, planes and people in motion, and churches and people through time. Using approaches drawn from literary studies, art history, and cognitive science, my chapters examine how Proust asks us to reconsider four conceptual categories: matter, space, energy, and time. My first chapter argues that materiality in the Recherche is both presence and absence, combining vivid sensory details with an awareness that our material impressions are transitory and impermanent. In my second chapter, I explore imaginative immersion through Proust’s sea and sky images, and situate these images within a broader dialogue about theories of landscape representation from nineteenth-century painting to contemporary ecocriticism. My third chapter demonstrates how Proust’s images create imaginative energy by evoking speed, light, and fragmentation. My fourth and final chapter looks at Proust’s images of churches to show how the cumulative imaginative training the reader has done throughout the Recherche prepares them for the novel’s concluding image of spatialized time. Ultimately, “Seeing Impossible Things” both advances our understanding of Proustian aesthetics through close analysis of his descriptive techniques, and demonstrates the experiential specificity of how we imagine when we read.
- Date of publication
- 2021
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
- Advisor
- Tanner, Jessica
- Welch, Ellen
- Douglas , Eduardo
- Proulx, François
- Valazza, Nicolas
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2021
- Language
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