Was Marcel Proust the last of the great classics or the first of the revolutionaries? Proust was thirty in 1901 and he died in 1922, living longer in the nineteenth century than he did in the twentieth. His work, especially the monumental sixteen-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, draws its aesthetic affinities from the century of Baudelaire, Wagner, and Ruskin but at the same time escapes late nineteenth-century decadent aestheticism to reach toward an early twentieth-century modernist stance.
Was Marcel Proust the last of the great classics or the first of the revolutionaries? Proust was thirty in 1901 and he died in 1922, living longer in ...
In the late twentieth century, the common sense approach to literature was deemed naive. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and Hillis Miller declared that all interpretation is theoretical. In many a literature department, graduate students spent far more time on Derrida and Foucault than on Shakespeare and Milton. Despite this, common sense approaches to literature--including the belief that literature represents reality and authorial intentions matter--have resisted theory with tenacity. As a result, argues Antoine Compagnon, theorists have gone to extremes, boxed...
In the late twentieth century, the common sense approach to literature was deemed naive. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and Hil...
