Proust's English [Hardcover]

Daniel Karlin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 8, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

This elegantly argued study explores the role of English words in "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu," and of the Anglophilia they represent. Proust did not speak English, and read it only with difficulty (though he translated Ruskin, with much help from others). But his novel is sprinkled with words such as "gentleman," "le five-o'clock tea," and, most significant, "snob." Odette, the ultimate social climber, even speaks "with a slight English accent," revealing her falseness, her snootiness, and her sordid past; her mother, Proust writes, sold her, "when she was still hardly more than a child, at Nice, to a wealthy Englishman." The English language—like the yachting and golf enjoyed by the object of Marcel's desire—often connotes faithlessness, vulgarity, and even sexual ambiguity. But, perhaps most of all, it embodies modernity and the inescapability of change, the very force that transforms Odette into one of the most fashionable women in Parisian society.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Review

"This elegantly argued study explores the role of English words in � la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and of the Anglophilia they represent."--The New Yorker

"Karlin's book is more than a literary analysis of what the use of English reveals about the author and the characters in 'Remembrance'--it is a window into the cultural tension of 19th Century France."--Chicago Tribune

"This valuable contribution to Proustian studies is highly recommended.... The etymological descriptions of French words introduced into the English lexicon and later reintroduced to the French as English words are very interesting."--Library Journal

"Witty and urbane, Daniel Karlin has turned an unpromising, even unlikely subject into an unexpectedly intriguing view of Proust's masterpiece."--Times Literary Supplement

"This scrupulously learned but witty and playful book shows that the oddities of Anglo-Gallic attitudes gave a lasting theme to one of the world's finest comic writers.... As Daniel Karlin so shrewdly illustrates, [Proust] peppered the epic length of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu with Anglicisms, from 'cocktails' to 'five o'clock tea'; from 'tennis' to 'bridge'; from 'darling' to 'flirt'.... Karlin follows, in plenty of intriguing detail, the love-affairs and hate-affairs with English ways and words that bloomed in France a century ago."--The Independent

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 242 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Bilingual edition (December 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199256888
• ISBN-13: 978-0199256884
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,657,474 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.