Title: The gardens of desire : Marcel Proust and the fugitive sublime /
Authors: Brown, Stephen Gilbert, 1949-
Publisher: State University of New York Press,
Year: 2004
Subjects: Proust, Marcel, Criticism and interpretation.; Desire in literature.
Abstract: "The Gardens of Desire is at once a model of literary interpretation and a groundbreaking psychocritical reading of a literary masterpiece, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Shedding new light on the origins of the creative impulse in general, and on the psychological origins of the Recherche in particular, the book illuminates the hidden associations between matricidal, suicidal, sadistic, masochistic, homoerotic, and creative impulses as manifested in Proust's work.
Contents: Introduction : entering the garden -- The kiss of death : desire in the garden of good and evil -- The art of Sapphic desire : the curse of the little phrase -- The hymenoptera of self and other : the making and (un)making of knowledge -- Three moments of desire : the ideal, the real, and the remembered -- Recherche and the Rankian gaze -- Conclusion : the art of madness.