The Weather in Proust
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- 239,00 kr
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- 239,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
The Weather in Proust gathers pieces written by the eminent critic and theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the last decade of her life, as she worked toward a book on Proust. This book takes its title from the first essay, a startlingly original interpretation of Proust. By way of Neoplatonism, Buddhism, and the work of Melanie Klein, Sedgwick establishes the sense of refreshment and surprise that the author of the Recherche affords his readers. Proust also figures in pieces on the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, object relations, affect theory, and Sedgwick’s textile art practices. More explicitly connected to her role as a pioneering queer theorist are an exuberant attack against reactionary refusals of the work of Guy Hocquenghem and talks in which she lays out her central ideas about sexuality and her concerns about the direction of US queer theory. Sedgwick lived for more than a dozen years with a diagnosis of terminal cancer; its implications informed her later writing and thinking, as well as her spiritual and artistic practices. In the book’s final and most personal essay, she reflects on the realization of her impending death. Featuring thirty-seven color images of her art, The Weather in Proust offers a comprehensive view of Sedgwick’s later work, underscoring its diversity and coherence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This posthumous collection of Sedgwick's essays presents readers with a glittering kaleidoscope of "capacious concerns." Sedgwick, a pioneer in queer studies, shines as she contemplates Proust, textile art, and mortality in language that is challenging and exhilarating. In the collection's titular essay, she offers an elucidating contemplation on Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), reading it through the lens of psychoanalysis, steeping it in the writings of Freud, Lacan, Klein, and Winnicott. Drawing upon Klein's object-relations theory, Sedgwick ties "Proust's narrator's inability to sleep in an unfamiliar space" to Proust's own suffering from asthma, his "fear of being unable to breathe." And Sedgwick's particular insight further reveals itself in her analysis of the novel's ending. She writes that traditional "psychoanalytically structured readings...have found the novel's ending stiflingly marmoreal: the story of a successfully consolidated omnipotence." However, under Sedgwick's Kleinian lens, "omnipotence is a fear at least as much as it is a wish." A reflexive and engaging writer, Sedgewick discusses how her practice as a "visual and textile artist" invigorates and personalizes her prose. She contrasts speaking and theoretical writing with working with physical material, praising the "reassuring grounding in reality." Engaging with Sedgwick will fill readers will wonder.
