Part 1:
I would like this introduction to be a brilliant synthesis of global, historical and futuristic ideas, ideas unfamiliar to the readers who come to this site. Sometimes, it seems to me, my best literary essays are models of the art of the introduction. I don't think that is the case here; one can but try. I have been a student and/or a teacher of literature, of poetry, and of writing from the 1950s to the present, 2014. I believe, & I have believed, that much of the craft of writing, and the understanding and use of literature, of prose and poetry, can be taught. “I can help you with part of the process,” I have often told my students. “The rest is up to you.” In the 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s, I was taught by others. I have now been offering suggestions for nearly 50 years. I gave editing advice in the form of spelling and grammar, expression and writing skills, what you might call surgery, for decades. Inspiration, as opposed to the craft of writing, is another question.
LITERATURE: ONE MAN'S VIEW
Marcel Proust (1871-1922), the French novelist and critic, was a great reader, as are all his characters. He wrote, “Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature.” For many literary critics Proust wrote the most respected novel of the twentieth century, Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time, as it has come to be translated. Since I began writing autobiographically in the early 1980s, Proust has superseded Joyce as what you might call 'the top-of-the-pops' in novels and novelists. For most of the students I ever taught or studied with in the years from 1949 to 2009, some sixty years, and for most of the people I ever met, neither of these novelists are much read. For more of this article by Edmund White, Proust the Passionate Reader, on 4 April 2013 in The New York Review of Books go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...ionate-reader/
Part 2:
WHY I OPEN WITH AND QUOTE PROUST
I have opened this sub-section of my website, this introduction to literature, with a quotation from Proust for several reasons. Proust had, as I have come to have, a compulsive need to translate my experience into words. This has occurred in these years of my early retirement, and these years of the reinvention of myself from teacher and tutor to writer and poet: 1999 to 2013. Proust's writing of his famous novel In Search of Lost Time is, what my writing has become for me, at least to a significant degree, by sensible and insensible degrees in the last 30 years: a vast meditation on the relationship between time, memory and art.
Proust tries to reconstruct his life from childhood to middle age, as I have done from childhood to late adulthood. For those who become serious readers of Proust, it becomes clear that everything they’ve read in Recherche or Time Regained constitutes the inner journey of a man who has aspired to become a writer and finally has found his subject, his material. That subject and that material is: himself and the whole of his life, during which he was convinced that he had lost, or wasted, his time. At that point, the reader feels the urge to reread the book in order to better understand this inner journey. I, too, found that same subject, but it was not with the view that I had wasted my life.
I have posted more than 250 times over the last several years at this literature website, more than a quarter-of-a-million words, and got lots of feedback. To access my posts click on my photo at the top-left of this page, and then click on the words "Find latest posts" on the left side of the page to which you are taken. For more of my long thread on this part of my website on the introduction to literature go to:http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/Literature.html