Proust’s English
Daniel Karlin
Abstract
English is the ‘second language’ of A la recherche du temps perdu. Although much has been written about Proust’s debt to English literature especially Ruskin, this book is the first to focus on his knowledge of the language itself — on vocabulary, idiom, and etymology. This book uncovers an ‘English world’ in Proust’s work, a world whose social comedy and artistic values reveal surprising connections to some of the novel’s central preoccupations with sexuality and art. Anglomanie — the fashion for all things English — has been as powerful a presence in French culture as hostility to perfide Al ... More
English is the ‘second language’ of A la recherche du temps perdu. Although much has been written about Proust’s debt to English literature especially Ruskin, this book is the first to focus on his knowledge of the language itself — on vocabulary, idiom, and etymology. This book uncovers an ‘English world’ in Proust’s work, a world whose social comedy and artistic values reveal surprising connections to some of the novel’s central preoccupations with sexuality and art. Anglomanie — the fashion for all things English — has been as powerful a presence in French culture as hostility to perfide Albion; Proust was both subject to its influence, and a brilliant critic of its excesses. French resistance to imported English words remains fierce to this day; but Proust’s attitude to this most contentious aspect of Anglo–French relations was marked by his rejection of concepts of national and racial ‘purity’, and his profound understanding of the necessary ‘impurity’ of artistic creation.
Keywords:
English,
Proust,
Ruskin,
vocabulary,
idiom,
etymology,
social comedy,
artistic values,
sexuality,
Anglomanie
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2007 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199256891 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256891.001.0001 |
