RODOPI In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography: 393 (Faux Titre, 393)

Marcel Proust offered the twentieth century a new psychology of memory and seeing. His novel In Search of Lost Time was written in the modern age of photography and art history. In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography is an intellectual adventure that brings to light Proust's visual imagination, his visual metaphors, and his photographic resources and imaginings. The book features over 90 illustrations. Mary Bergstein highlights various kinds of photography: daguerreotypes, stereoscopic cards, cartes-de-visite, postcards, book illustrations, and other photographic mediums. Portraiture, medical photography, spirit photography, architectural photography, Orientalism, ethnographic photography, and fin-de-siècle studies of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Vermeer, are considered in terms of Proust's life and work. The net is cast wide, and each image under discussion has been researched with subtle attention to art, literature, and cultural history. This scholarly study in literature and visual culture will be a delight, too, for general readers who love photography or Proust. Review "Aus dem facettenreichen Buch spricht die vielfältige und teilweise widersprüchliche visuelle Kultur des 19. Jahrhunderts: Prousts Recherche bildet nur den Schnitt- und Symmetriepunkt der vielen Figuren, die sich in diesem Kaleidoskop andeuten, kurz aufleuchten und dann zu einer neuen Gestalt übergehen." - Mattei Chiaia, Zeitschrift für Französische Sprache und Literatur, 126, 2016/1–2, 136–139. "tje groundbreaking nature of Bergstein’s foray into [the] historicizing triad of French intellectualism, photography and Jewishness [...] a significant contribution to Jewish studies and visual culture." - Maya Balakirsky Katz, Images, 2017. About the Author Mary Bergstein won the “Courage to Dream” book prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association for Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell 2010). She has published widely on topics from Italian Renaissance sculpture to contemporary photography. Mary Bergstein has been Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design since 1990.