Title: The mottled screen
First published: 1997
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.
Subjects: Optical instruments in literature, Technique, Visual communication, Proust, marcel, 1871-1922
People: Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
LC classification: PQ2631.R63 Z52513 1997