Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative after Proust: Prose Pictures and Fictional Recollection

"This book explores the relationship between ekphrasis and memory in the novel after Marcel Proust. Drawing on À la recherche du temps perdu as a model, Leonid Bilmes considers how Vladimir Nabokov, W.G. Sebald, Lydia Davis, Ali Smith and Ben Lerner have employed and reshaped Proust's way of depicting the recollected past. In each of these writers' works, memory images are variously transformed into alluring intermedial objects that inform the narrator's story, just as they shape the reader's own memory of the text. Ekphrasis in the novel after Proust, Bilmes argues, is more than mere descriptive ornament or plot device: it is a pivotal textual site where image and text, past and present, memory and forgetting, self and other continuously contest one another. Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative after Proust surveys a wide field of critical inquiry, encompassing classic accounts of ekphrasis and memory in Horace, Henri Bergson and Paul Ricoeur, as well as more recent interventions by theorists including W.J.T. Mitchell, Jean-Luc Nancy and Liliane Louvel. The book's open dialogue between literature and theory presents a cogent argument in favour of the bond between ekphrasis and memory in the novel, one as yet underexplored"--