Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context

**Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title (2004) by Choice Magazine**

This book centers on three writers whose prose fictions became exemplary of the modernist drive to reconstitute a vision of life with universal reach. Proust, Mann, and Joyce each attained a particular kind of encyclopedic range, and in distinct but related ways their work encompassed much of the spiritual history of Modernism. Here, Gerald Gillespie argues that works such as In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain, and Ulysses not only internalized the full range of modernist experiences and anxieties but transcended them to achieve a holistic vision.

Gillespie contends that modernism included more than expressions of discontinuity, dissociation, fragmentation, arbitrary assemblage, and the like. By restoring context to this study, he confronts misunderstandings of what Proust, Mann, and Joyce achieved. Chapters treating their themes and traits are bracketed by chapters establishing the cultural continuum in which they worked and, in turn, became themselves exemplary. Other chapters suggest the rich cross-cultural referentiality and interest in other arts that characterize their novels. Proust provides in his narrator one who experiences modernism as it unfolds. The constant discoursing through meditations on the arts, society, technology, political life, the passions, the conditions of life, and much more has its analogue in the way Mann and Joyce, each in his fashion, employ the tradition of the humoristic-encyclopedic novel to create an epic picture of the human situation in their age.

Contrary to postmodernist allegations of a modernist evasion of history, Gillespie finds that Proust, Mann, and Joyce mobilize an impressive repertory of anthropological and cultural knowledge for coping with the world's complexity. His most controversial claim is that they attained thereby a sacramental sense that imbues each of their epics of modernity with its lasting power for readers today.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

""Gillespie's long and productive scholarly career evidences itself in the encyclopedic scope of this insightful analysis of literary history. Although Gillespie focuses on what modernism means in the works of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce, he refers to hundreds of works (many less known)--literary, cinematic, dramatic, and visual--often in minute detail. In so doing he provides an expanded definition of modernism and indeed of all cultural history. For Gillespie, modernism goes beyond discontinuity and fragmentation to a creative sense of time and the individual's relation to it. He takes issue with the postmodernist tendency to dismiss modernism as being ahistorical and apolitical, arguing that the work of the modernist masters achieves a universality that is sacramental.""--P. D. O'Connor, Choice

""[Gillespie] brings to this enormously learned study more than forty years of reading, thinking, meditating, and teaching. Gillespie infuses this truly comparative tome with the dazzling results of a long career as a passionate, informed, and creative literary scholar. . . . With each successive chapter, the canon we thought we knew and had clearly configured expands, contracts, whirs and tilts, then proves far more slippery and indeterminate than we might have anticipated. . . . Part romantic, part dreamer, and entirely humanist in his erudite orientation, Gillespie offers startling and ingenious permutations of received literary ideas and trumps even the most skeptical of readers with the sheer range of his encyclopedic knowledge and scintillating critical mind.""--Suzette Henke, English Studies in Canada

""Using Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and James Joyce as his touchstones, Gerald Gillespie uncovers with a fresh eye the emergence of modern narrative from its European heritage as it bursts into the twentieth centu