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Proust's English
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, Daniel Karlin is the first critic to focus on his knowledge of the language itself--on vocabulary, idiom, and etymology. He 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.
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.
- GenresNonfiction
Hardcover
First published August 12, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 16, 2020
If you’re a Proustian and a lover of words and are a Francophile and Anglophile and also at etymologist, ha! Then this book is right up your alley: perfect!
September 4, 2025
Great fun - but really, this could've been an article. It'd have made an excellent eventful article but unfortunately this book is a nice nob of butter spread over a mile of bread.
This is quite the recurring ailment amongst books of this sort - by that I mean ultra-specific niche analyses of a single author "The semicolon in the works of Virginia Woolf" (an invented example but perhaps there's a doctoral student somewhere hard at work typing away a few hundred pages on this).
In cases such as these you've often got a rock-solid kernel of good ideas and examples but then need to pad it out and the final result is a watery, diluted, soporific mess. Although perhaps preaching economy of words and self-denial to a Proustian is like spitting at the sun...
This is quite the recurring ailment amongst books of this sort - by that I mean ultra-specific niche analyses of a single author "The semicolon in the works of Virginia Woolf" (an invented example but perhaps there's a doctoral student somewhere hard at work typing away a few hundred pages on this).
In cases such as these you've often got a rock-solid kernel of good ideas and examples but then need to pad it out and the final result is a watery, diluted, soporific mess. Although perhaps preaching economy of words and self-denial to a Proustian is like spitting at the sun...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews