HUMS 409, Interpretations - Remembrance of Things Past

Meeting Time: 
MW 1pm-2:15pm

 “The only paradise is a lost paradise.”  

A close reading (in English) of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, with emphasis upon major themes: time and memory, desire and jealousy, social life and artistic experience, sexual identity and personal authenticity, class and nation. Portions from Swann’s WayWithin a Budding GroveCities of the PlainTime Regained considered from biographical, psychological/psychoanalytic, gender, sociological, historical, and philosophical perspectives.

Syllabus

Led By:

Professor Howard Bloch

Professor Howard Bloch is Sterling Professor of French at Yale University. He has written on a variety of topics in and around medieval literature and social history, legal, economic, familial, and political institutions, humor and the fabliaux, gender and the rise of Western romantic love and the history of the discipline of Medieval Studies.

Bloch holds a medal from the Collège de France, is an officer in the Order of Arts and Letters, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society.  He is currently completing a book on Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard.” 

Pierre Saint-Amand's picture

Professor Pierre Saint-Amand

Pierre Saint-Amand has research interests in the literature of the eighteenth-century, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and literary criticism and theory. His first book, Diderot: Le Labyrinthe de la relation (1984), was devoted to the philosophical and scientific writings of Denis Diderot. He has written on the novel, especially the libertine novel, in The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1994). Another book, The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment (1996) offers a reading of the political writings of the philosophes through the lens of an anthropology of violence. His most recent book, The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment (2011), is a study of the resistance to the ideology of work at the dawn of capitalism. 
 
Pierre Saint-Amand has edited two erotic novels of the 18th century, the best-seller Thérèse philosophe and Confession d’une jeune fille, both in Gallimard’s Romanciers libertins du XVIIIe siècle (2000, 2005). He has also published on the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century on authors such as Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, Hervé Guibert, Pascal Quignard and Abdellah Taïa.