The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past - Softcover

Moss, Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 158988079X ISBN 13: 9781589880795

Publisher: Paul Dry Books, 2012

Synopsis

"[The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust] reduces the ungainly and intricately designed masterpiece to its shape, and with hardly a wasted word...The paragraphs on habit and memory are truly wonderful wonderful as explication, as psychology, and as philosophy." John Updike

"Almost everything Moss says seems to me right, illuminating, and new. This is the book of a mature and individual mind and sensibility, with a deep experience of moral, social, psychological, and aesthetic values which is rare among critics." George D. Painter

"A moving and inspiring book. Moss clears away dark corners, clarifies motivations, and places the huge work within the reader's perspective. A book of great value to the scholar and the general reader." Publishers Weekly

"Remembrance of Things Past is more than a novel; it is a work in which a single person's life is transformed into a mythology, with its own pantheon of gods, its own religious rituals, and its own moral laws. A total vision, it does not rely on any system outside itself for support. It is as if Dante had set out to write the Paradiso and the Inferno utilizing only the facts of his own existence without any reference to Christianity...Other novelists describe or invent worlds. Remembrance of Things Past is an entire universe created and interpreted by Marcel Proust." from Chapter 1

"Moss lays out the sweeping claims and overarching structure of Remembrance of Things Past the significance of Swann's Way and the Guermantes Way, or why there are such long party scenes and is equally good at bringing to light all sorts of tiny, revealing details." from the new Foreword by Damion Searls

Howard Moss was poetry editor of the New Yorker for almost forty years. He also wrote more than a dozen books of poetry, plays, criticism, and a book of arch parody-microbiographies of cultural figures, Instant Lives, illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Damion Searls is the author of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going (stories) and has written for Harper’s, Bookforum, n+1, and The Believer. As a translator of authors including Marcel Proust (On Reading) he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.

About this title

About the Author

Howard Moss was poetry editor of the New Yorker from 1948 until his death in 1987. He won the National Book Award in 1972 for Selected Poems.

Review

Praise for Howard Moss and The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust

"[The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust] reduces the ungainly and intricately designed masterpiece to its shape, and with hardly a wasted word...The paragraphs on habit and memory are truly wonderful―wonderful as explication, as psychology, and as philosophy."―John Updike

"Almost everything Moss says seems to me right, illuminating, and new. This is the book of a mature and individual mind and sensibility, with a deep experience of moral, social, psychological, and aesthetic values which is rare among critics."―George D. Painter

"A moving and inspiring book. Moss clears away dark corners, clarifies motivations, and places the huge work within the reader's perspective. A book of great value to the scholar and the general reader."―Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Paul Dry Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 158988079X
• ISBN 13: 9781589880795
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 124