The mottled screen
Subtitle: reading Proust visually
By: Mieke Bal.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 284
Subjects: Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922 -- Technique; Visual communication; Optical instruments in literature
Description: The Mottled Screen studies a great literary work that cannot be confined to language alone, even though it consists exclusively of words: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. The author offers a sustained "visual" reading of Proust's masterpiece, pointing out its visual strategies of representation, fantasy, and poetic thought.

Beginning with the attempts to emulate painting, the book develops a Proust a la Chardin, working around Chardin's painting The Skate, but only after first reading Chardin through Proust. The second part of the book is devoted to Proust's use of optical instruments - such as the magnifying glass, the eyeglass, the telescope - to produce or enhance the visions that constitute the raw material of his poetic imagination.

The final part reads the specifically "photographic" writing that permeates Remembrance as a highly original and astonishingly contemporary, almost postmodern, poetics.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-284).