DOCSLIB.ORG

Literary Cities

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Literary Cities LITERARY CITIES Seeing some of the great cities of the world through the eyes of writers Susannah Fullerton PARIS “The chief danger about Paris is that it is such a strong stimulant” T.S. Eliot Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” His experiences of the city are described in his book of that name, A Moveable Feast. Paris has always attracted writers from other lands – Dickens frequently hopped across the channel, sometimes with his friend Wilkie Collins, Nancy Mitford lived in Paris and wrote about French Kings and writers, Oscar Wilde, who spoke fluent French and wrote his play Salomé in that language, came to Paris after getting out of prison, and Thackeray wrote a poem about eating bouillabaisse in a Paris restaurant; Turgenev arrived from Russia; Hans Christian Andersen came from Denmark Strindberg from Sweden; Rainer Maria Rilke from Germany; Joyce and Beckett from Ireland. Henry James was one of many Americans to spend time in Paris – Thomas Jefferson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, Richard Wright, and Sherwood Anderson were other Americans who fell in love with Paris. And of course for French writers, Paris was Mecca, a source of endless inspiration, the home of publishers, and the place where research could be done in libraries. Voltaire, Colette, Beaumarchais, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Balzac, Proust, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Hugo, Proust, George Sand, Daudet, Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Dumas (father and son), Molière, La Fontaine, De Nerval, Apollinaire, Malraux, Prévert, Cocteau, Jules Verne, Baudelaire, Valéry, Rabelais, Flaubert, Sagan, Saint-Exupéry, Camus, Duras, and Mallarmé are just a few of the fantastic French writers who have lived, loved, written and died in the City of Light. Take a journey through literary Paris, discovering places connected with writers, dining where they dined, seeing where they set novels and poems, and discovering the literary treasures of one of the world’s greatest cities. Or better still, take this article with you to Paris and use it as a guide to see the French capital through the eyes of writers. Literary Houses According to Honoré de Balzac, “anyone who does not frequently visit Paris will never be completely elegant.” Balzac was one of many great French novelists who made Paris his home, and one of his houses there is now a literary museum. It is situated in the suburb of Passy and was his home from 1840 to 1847. Always in debt, Balzac lived there under a pseudonym so as to escape creditors, and was delighted that the house had doors on two levels, so he could nip out unseen if he needed to. “I live in my hole in Passy like a rat”, he wrote. It was here he worked on the books that make up his vast series of novels La Comédie Humaine, here he entertained other writers such as Dumas, Hugo and Gérard de Nerval. It is so fascinating to see the desk he literally wore down with his writing arm (he wrote for up to 19 hours per day): “I possessed it for ten years, it saw all of my misery, wiped away all of my tears, heard all my thoughts; my arm almost wore it out moving back and forth over it as I wrote”. Also on display are a model of Balzac’s hand (stolen by one visitor to the museum, but fortunately retrieved when that thief tried to leave the country), his famous turquoise studded cane, and the coffee pot that fuelled his long writing stints (he was so addicted to caffeine, that he was eventually reduced to chewing coffee beans to get enough caffeine into his system). You can look out the window of Balzac’s house and see the site once occupied by Dr Blanche’s mental asylum – this would be the last home of Guy de Maupassant when he went mad from tertiary syphilis. The Balzac house is a wonderful literary museum – well worth a visit! Victor Hugo lived in Paris – his home can also be visited, on the gorgeous Place des Vosges. Hugo lived in this house from 1832 to 1848 then had to leave when forced into exile because of his opposition to Louis-Napoléon. Many other writers came to visit Hugo in these rooms – Dumas, Dickens, Lamartine, Gautier and Balzac. Victor Hugo was fascinated by interior decoration and these rooms reflect his taste for the ornate. But you can really find Victor Hugo all over the city – at Notre Dame, the cathedral he helped to save (people said the front of the cathedral was really a giant H for Hugo); down in the sewers he made so famous when he sent his hero Jean-Valjean into them in Les Misérables. You can see his grave in the Panthéon, and then there is Arc de Triomphe where his body rested on its memorable funeral procession. And while you are admiring Places des Vosges, you might like to remember that Georges Simenon, letter writer Madame de Sévigné, novelist Théophile Gautier and Alphonse Daudet all lived on this stunning square, while D’Artagnan comes here to visit the wicked Miladi in Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. Monuments Erected in 1889 for the World Fair, the Eiffel Tower, symbol of Paris, was not immediately popular. Guy de Maupassant used to lunch there often because it was the only place in Paris where he did not have to look at a view of the Eiffel Tower. For 41 years it was the tallest man-made structure in the world. The Claude Izner novel Murder on the Eiffel Tower has a corpse found on the tower, while the Edward Rutherfurd novel Paris has a character who works on its construction. Museums The Museum of Romantic Life is at the Foot of Montmartre. The first floor is dedicated to novelist George Sand (Amantine-Lucile- Aurore Dupin) who used to dress as a man so she could safely wander the streets of Paris at night. You can see a reconstruction of her drawing room, and there are models of her right arm and of her lover Chopin’s left hand on display. The museum also has information about Delacroix, Liszt, Lamartine and Rossini. The building was once the base of artist Ary Scheffer, who did a famous cartoon picture of Charles Dickens. Another fabulous museum is the Carnavalet, a museum of the history of Paris. That’s where you can get a real sense of how Marcel Proust lived when he wrote À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Proust actually lived in the Boulevard Haussmann, but his home there is sadly not a museum. However, the Carnavalet has a reconstruction of his cork-lined room (lined with cork as he thought that protected his asthmatic lungs from dust), and many of his possessions are on display there – the portrait of his father Dr Proust, his spectacles, his narrow brass bed, his ink and notebooks etc. Proust did most of his writing in that very bed and seeing it is a moving and intensely literary experience – not many beds in this world have been covered by so much paper and ink. Great writers have left behind papers and letters and of course books. The Paris Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, only opened in 2004, has an extraordinary collection of material – one of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenile books, letters by Descartes, the Marquis de Sade, Stendhal, Jules Verne, Tolstoy, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, Proust and many other writers are on display there. The Cluny Museum, or Museum of the Middle Ages, was once an abbey and is worth seeing for the building alone. It has a fabulous collection of illuminated manuscripts. It also has the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, subject of Tracy Chevalier’s novel The Lady and the Unicorn. These tapestries were saved for the nation by an author, Prosper Mérimée, who found them in 1841 in an old chateau and brought them away to be repaired and cared for. Burial Places The largest cemetery in Paris, and the best known is Père Lachaise, which opened in 1804 just after Napoléon was crowned. The city desperately need more room to bury people. The land had once belonged to the confessor of Louis XIV – hence its name. When the new cemetery proved rather unpopular because it was too empty and considered unfashionable, it was decided to move some notables there to give it cachet. Those chosen for reinterrment were writers. La Fontaine, author of fables who had once begged “separate me from the goats” was moved there, as was Molière – these two gave the place the needed cachet, and then others ‘moved in’. Lovers Héloise and Abelard were also reinterred in Père Lachaise. You can find many other authors as you wander what Mark Twain called “the solemn city of winding streets” – the playwright Beaumarchais, gastronomic writer Brillat-Savarin, Balzac (who died only five months after finally getting married), poet and essayist Gérard de Nerval (who hanged himself from a Paris lamppost on the corner of Slaughter Street and Rue Impasse), poet Alfred de Musset (one of George Sand’s many lovers), Alphonse Daudet (who wrote the fabulous Letters from my Windmill), Marcel Proust, Colette, symbolist poet Guillaume Apollinaire (who coined the word ‘Surrealism’), and political writer Benjamin Constant. The most visited literary grave is that of Oscar Wilde, whose body was moved to Père Lachaise 9 years after he died.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Manhattan Transference: Reader Itineraries in Modernist New York
    Oberlin Digital Commons at Oberlin Honors Papers Student Work 2013 Manhattan Transference: Reader Itineraries in Modernist New York Sophia Bamert Oberlin College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/honors Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Repository Citation Bamert, Sophia, "Manhattan Transference: Reader Itineraries in Modernist New York" (2013). Honors Papers. 308. https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/honors/308 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Work at Digital Commons at Oberlin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Papers by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons at Oberlin. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 Sophia Bamert April 19, 2013 Oberlin College English Honors Paper Advisor: T.S. McMillin Manhattan Transference: Reader Itineraries in Modernist New York The development of transportation technologies played a vital role in New York City’s transformation into a modern metropolis. Between 1884 and 1893, travel by rapid transit in New York increased by 250 percent,1 and “by 1920 there were 2,365,000,000 riders annually on all city transit lines . twice as many as all the steam railroads in the country carried” (Michael W. Brooks 90). The Elevated trains, which were completed by 1880,2 and the subways, opened in 1904, fueled construction and crowding in the booming city,3 and they fundamentally altered the everyday experience of living in New York. These modern transit technologies were novel in and of themselves, but, moreover, they offered passengers previously unaccessible views of the urban landscape through which they moved: from above the streets on an Elevated track, from underground in a subway tunnel, and so on.
    [Show full text]
  • The Death of the City and the Survival of Urban Life Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004 Conference Lectured at the Symposium “Urban Traumas
    www.urban.cccb.org Richard Ingersoll The Death of the City and the Survival of Urban Life Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004 Conference lectured at the symposium “Urban Traumas. The City and Disasters”. CCCB, 7-11 July 2004 Strolling through the cemetery of Montparnasse in Paris, I fantasize a poker game with an ideal community of the defunct that includes Marguerite Duras, Charles Baudelaire, Delphine Seyrig, and Samuel Beckett. Their modest burial markers rest alongside the ornate aedicules of the proud and powerful, belle époque generals and financiers. Looking around at the densely packed lanes lined with tombs, there seems to be no room left. The necropolis is so crowded that for a moment I have the infantile notion that no one else will be allowed to die. The Montparnasse cemetery is right in the midst of one of the busiest parts of the Left Bank, and to enter is to escape from the tedium of daily life, a place to contemplate the life of the past. In the background rises the immense black, glass-clad tower of Montparnasse, a soaring catacomb for modern offices. Life goes on in the city, overlooking the cemetery, but, as I will try to show, it was never the city itself that was alive. In fact I am often convinced while visiting cemeteries that the only reason the city became a place is because someone died there. René Girard in his theory of the scapegoat suggests that architecture began with stones used to lapidate a victim. «In the end», says Girard, «the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol».
    [Show full text]
  • The Sound of Ford Madox Ford: War-Time, Impressionism, and Narrative Form
    The Sound of Ford Madox Ford: War-Time, Impressionism, and Narrative Form Rachel Kyne ELH, Volume 87, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp. 211-244 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2020.0007 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751744 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] THE SOUND OF FORD MADOX FORD: WAR-TIME, IMPRESSIONISM, AND NARRATIVE FORM BY RACHEL KYNE “It is rather curious, the extra senses one develops here,” Ford Madox Ford wrote to Lucy Masterman in August 1916 from the Ypres Salient.1 “I sit writing in the twilight &, even as I write, I hear the shells whine & the M. G.’s [machine guns] crepitate & I see (tho’ it is hidden by a hill), the grey, flat land below & the shells bursting. Thanks so very much for the Echo de Paris.”2 Musing on the coexistence of the sounds of war and the activity of writing, Ford inadvertently slips from the audible landscape of the front to the literary Echo of the page. Ford’s experience of war sounds in the summer of 1916 awakened him to the literary possibilities of an auditory impressionism. Between mid-July and mid-September 1916, he was deployed to France, partici- pated in his first active combat at the Battle of the Somme, suffered a concussion caused by an exploding shell, lost his memory for three weeks, returned to his battalion in the Ypres Salient with a renewed devotion to capturing the war in writing, and suffered a second collapse attributed to
    [Show full text]
  • A Humble Protest a Literary Generation's Quest for The
    A HUMBLE PROTEST A LITERARY GENERATION’S QUEST FOR THE HEROIC SELF, 1917 – 1930 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jason A. Powell, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2008 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Steven Conn, Adviser Professor Paula Baker Professor David Steigerwald _____________________ Adviser Professor George Cotkin History Graduate Program Copyright by Jason Powell 2008 ABSTRACT Through the life and works of novelist John Dos Passos this project reexamines the inter-war cultural phenomenon that we call the Lost Generation. The Great War had destroyed traditional models of heroism for twenties intellectuals such as Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos, compelling them to create a new understanding of what I call the “heroic self.” Through a modernist, experience based, epistemology these writers deemed that the relationship between the heroic individual and the world consisted of a dialectical tension between irony and romance. The ironic interpretation, the view that the world is an antagonistic force out to suppress individual vitality, drove these intellectuals to adopt the Freudian conception of heroism as a revolt against social oppression. The Lost Generation rebelled against these pernicious forces which they believed existed in the forms of militarism, patriotism, progressivism, and absolutism. The
    [Show full text]
  • Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism
    Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Purdue University Press Book Previews Purdue University Press 2-2020 Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism Steven G. Kellman Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_previews Part of the Language Interpretation and Translation Commons This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. NIMBLE TongueS Comparative Cultural Studies Ari Ofengenden, Series Editor The series examines how cultural practices, especially contemporary creative media, both shape and themselves are shaped by current global developments such as the digitization of culture, virtual reality, global interconnectedness, increased people flows, transhumanism, environ- mental degradation, and new forms of subjectivities. We aim to publish manuscripts that cross disciplines and national borders in order to pro- vide deep insights into these issues. Other titles in this series Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars Alla Ivanchikova The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth’s Works Rares G. Piloiu Perspectives on Science and Culture Kris Rutten, Stefaan Blancke, and Ronald Soetaert Faust Adaptations from Marlowe to Aboudoma and Markland Lorna Fitzsimmons (Ed.) Subjectivity in ʿAṭṭār, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism Claudia Yaghoobi Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German James P. Wilper Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France Regina R. Félix and Scott D. Juall (Eds.) Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility Arianna Dagnino NIMBLE TongueS Studies in Literary Translingualism Steven G. Kellman Purdue University Press • West Lafayette, Indiana Copyright 2020 by Purdue University.
    [Show full text]
  • Limonaire Frères Paris, 1839 — 1936*
    Carousel Organ , Issue No. 26 — January, 2006 Limonaire Frères Paris, 1839 — 1936* Andrea Stadler “Limonaire” is without any doubt the most famous name in the field of mechanical music. In 1906 it became (accord- ing to “le petit Robert de la langue française,” ed. 1986) a standardized name to be found in French dictionaries, gen- erally as a synonym for a carousel organ. There are several instruments bearing the name Limonaire found in muse- ums or in public or private collections, about which there is technical documentation. On the other hand, we knew almost nothing about “les Frères Limonaire” and the history of the firm, until a German university student, Andrea Stadler, took the time during the preparation of her doctorate, to do extensive research in the archives of the Records Office, commercial and notarial records, and elsewhere. Most of the private documents of the Limonaire family have disappeared. She also had the chance to interview some rare descendants of the family. She has given us the honour to publish in the Carousel Organ , for the first time in English, some parts of the results of her investigation. Philippe Rouillé First part: 1839-1886 The different establishments “Limonaire Frères” When examining the history of the “Limonaire Frères,” one finds that this firm has existed twice under this name in the history of musical instruments. The Bottin , a French commer- cial directory, mentions them from 1839 to 1841 and again from 1887 till 1920. After 1920, the Sociétés succeeding the Limonaire brothers took over a major part of the famous organ builders.
    [Show full text]
  • Making the New: Literary Periodicals and the Construction of Modernism
    Making the New: Literary Periodicals and the Construction of Modernism Peter Marks University of Sydney We are told that we live in a postmodernworld, experiencing unprecedented innovations, delights, and anxieties. Rather than rehearse these here, I want initially to touch brieflyon one theoretical attempt to make sense of this condition, one that definesPostmodernism in relation to its presumed antecedent, Modernism. I want to use this as a way of questioning the "monumental" view of literary Modernism, in which a massive landscape abounds with canonical texts carved by mythical giants: Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Pound, Stein-the usual suspects. I do this by considering the role of literary periodicals in the construction, production, and initial reception of those texts. The later part of this discussion focuses on transition, the Paris-based journal of the 1920s and 1930s whose aspirations, pretensions, vigor and perilous existence typify the complex forces in play. I emphasize the point that while indi­ vidual periodicals consciously adopted distinct identities, they need to be understood collectively forthe vital functionsthey performed: they printed avant-garde work as well as advanced criticism and theory; acted as nurseries for experimental young writers, and as platformsfor the already-established; forged and maintained interna­ tional links between writers and groups; provided avant-garde writers with sophisti­ cated readers, and vice versa; and maintained an ipteractiveplurality of cultural dis­ course. Alive with the energy of experimentation, they register the fertile, complex, yet intriguingly tentative development of modem literature. In his inquisitive and provocative work, ThePostmodern Turn, lhab Hassan moves towards a concept of postmodernism by constructing a table of "certain schematic differences from modernism" (91).
    [Show full text]
  • Pynchon Nods: Proust in Gravity's Rainbow Date: 2012 Volume: 1 Issue: 1 URL: DOI: 10.7766/Orbit.V1.1.30
    Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon https://www.pynchon.net ISSN: 2044-4095 Author(s): Erik Ketzan Affiliation(s): Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, Germany Title: Pynchon Nods: Proust in Gravity's Rainbow Date: 2012 Volume: 1 Issue: 1 URL: https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/30 DOI: 10.7766/orbit.v1.1.30 Abstract: This paper argues that Pynchon may allude to Marcel Proust through the character Marcel in Part 4 of Gravity's Rainbow and, if so, what that could mean. I trace the textual clues that relate to Proust and analyze what Pynchon may be saying about a fellow great experimental writer. Pynchon Nods: Proust in Gravity's Rainbow Erik Ketzan Editorial note: a previous draft of this paper appeared on The Modern Word in 2010. Remember the "Floundering Four" part in Gravity's Rainbow? It's a short story of sorts that takes place in a city of the future called Raketen-Stadt (German for "Rocket City") and features a cast of comic book-style super heroes called the Floundering Four. One of them is named Marcel, and I submit that he is meant as some kind of representation of the great Marcel Proust. Only eight pages long, the Floundering Four section is a parody/riff on a sci-fi comic book story, loosely patterned on The Fantastic Four by Marvel Comics. It appears near the end of Gravity's Rainbow among a set of thirteen chapterettes, each one a fragmentary "text". As Pynchon scholar Steven Weisenburger explains, "A variety of discourses, modes and forms are parodied in the… subsections..
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Matt Phillips, 'French Studies: Literature, 2000 to the Present Day
    1 Matt Phillips, ‘French Studies: Literature, 2000 to the Present Day’, Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies, 80 (2020), 209–260 DOI for published version: https://doi.org/10.1163/22224297-08001010 [TT] Literature, 2000 to the Present Day [A] Matt Phillips, Royal Holloway, University of London This survey covers the years 2017 and 2018 [H2]1. General Alexandre Gefen, Réparer le monde: la littérature française face au XXIe siècle, Corti, 2017, 392 pp., argues that contemporary French literature has undergone a therapeutic turn, with both writing and reading now conceived in terms of healing, helping, and doing good. G. defends this thesis with extraordinary thoroughness as he examines the turn’s various guises: as objects of literature’s care here feature the self and its fractures; trauma, both individual and collective; illness, mental and physical; mourning and forgetfulness, personal and historical; and endangered bonds, with humans and beyond, on local and global scales. This amounts to what G. calls a new ‘paradigme clinique’ and, like any paradigm shift, this one appears replete with contradictions, tensions, and opponents, not least owing to the residual influence of preceding paradigms; G.’s analysis is especially impressive when unpicking the ways in which contemporary writers negotiate their sustained attachments to a formal, intransitive conception of literature, and/or more overtly revolutionary political projects. His thesis is supported by an enviable breadth of reference: G. lays out the diverse intellectual, technological, and socioeconomic histories at work in this development, and touches on close to 200 contemporary writers. Given the broad, synthetic nature of the work’s endeavour, individual writers/works are rarely discussed for longer than a page, and though G.’s commentary is always insightful, specialists on particular authors or social/historical trends will surely find much to work with and against here.
    [Show full text]
  • CHAMPS-ELYSEES ROLL OR STROLL from the Arc De Triomphe to the Tuileries Gardens
    CHAMPS-ELYSEES ROLL OR STROLL From the Arc de Triomphe to the Tuileries Gardens Don’t leave Paris without experiencing the avenue des Champs-Elysées (shahnz ay-lee-zay). This is Paris at its most Parisian: monumental side- walks, stylish shops, grand cafés, and glimmering showrooms. This tour covers about three miles. If that seems like too much for you, break it down into several different outings (taxis roll down the Champs-Elysées frequently and Métro stops are located every 3 blocks). Take your time and enjoy. It’s a great roll or stroll day or night. The tour begins at the top of the Champs-Elysées, across a huge traffic circle from the famous Arc de Triomphe. Note that getting to the arch itself, and access within the arch, are extremely challenging for travelers with limited mobility. I suggest simply viewing the arch from across the street (described below). If you are able, and you wish to visit the arch, here’s the informa- tion: The arch is connected to the top of the Champs-Elysées via an underground walkway (twenty-five 6” steps down and thirty 6” steps back up). To reach this passageway, take the Métro to the not-acces- sible Charles de Gaulle Etoile station and follow sortie #1, Champs- Elysées/Arc de Triomphe signs. You can take an elevator only partway up the inside of the arch, to a museum with some city views. To reach the best views at the very top, you must climb the last 46 stairs. For more, see the listing on page *TK.
    [Show full text]
  • Jonathan Greenberg
    Losing Track of Time Jonathan Greenberg Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation tells a story of doing nothing; it is an antinovel whose heroine attempts to sleep for a year in order to lose track of time. This desire to lose track of time constitutes a refusal of plot, a satiric and passive- aggressive rejection of the kinds of narrative sequences that novels typically employ but that, Moshfegh implies, offer nothing but accommodation to an unhealthy late capitalist society. Yet the effort to stifle plot is revealed, paradoxically, as an ambi- tion to be achieved through plot, and so in resisting what novels do, My Year of Rest and Relaxation ends up showing us what novels do. Being an antinovel turns out to be just another way of being a novel; in seeking to lose track of time, the novel at- tunes us to our being in time. Whenever I woke up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed.1 For a long time I used to go to bed early.2 he first of these sentences begins Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novelMy Year of Rest and Relaxation; the second, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. More ac- T curately, the second sentence begins C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust, whose French reads, “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” D. J. Enright emends the translation to “I would go to bed”; Lydia Davis and Google Translate opt for “I went to bed.” What the translators famously wrestle with is how to render Proust’s ungrammatical combination of the completed action of the passé composé (“went to bed”) with a modifier (“long time”) that implies a re- peated, habitual, or everyday action.
    [Show full text]
  • Socialistic Vision of John Steinbeck and Dos Passos: Foucauldian Analysis of the Grapes of Wrath and Manhattan Transfer
    International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE) ISSN: 2277-3878, Volume-7, Issue-6S5, April 2019 Socialistic Vision of John Steinbeck and Dos Passos: Foucauldian Analysis of the Grapes of Wrath and Manhattan Transfer Neha Puri, Aruna Bhat I. INTRODUCTION Abstract:America emerged as a super power after the World War I but people also witnessed the suffering and severe John Steinbeck and Dos Passos were greatly impacted by degradation of American life. The Wall Street Crash, the the revolutionary atmosphere of 1930s. No wonder, Depression and the growth of Capitalism brought untold Manhattan Transfer (1925) of Dos Passos and The Grapes miseries to the fruit pickers and the farmers in America. John of Wrath (1939)[35],[5],[17] of John Steinbeck explore Steinbeck was inspired by the radical philosophy of Karl Marx individual freedom in socialistic collectivism; both the who propounded the theory of class less society giving a novels describe their nostalgic search for individualism in dialectical relationship between the haves and haves not. John Steinbeck is seriously concerned with the struggle of the “free enterprise.” proletariat. Steinbeck’s novels written during the 1930’s and 1940’s display his strong understanding of the common Dos Passos expressed his concern for the loss of liberty of Communist principles. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is the the individuals in his article “America and the Pursuit of heartrending tale of how “farming became industry” (298), Happiness” published in Nation thus: “We must stop the depicting the sufferings of the farmers trapped in the Dust Bowl economic war, the war for the existence of man against of the twenties.
    [Show full text]