what to read before reading proust?
nothing, proust stands on his own
>>23367599Ruskin. He dedicated his 20s to reading and translating him.
>>23367599Ruskin, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Walter Pater, and a little Emerson (he liked him)
>>23367599You have to read/listen to Parsifal to understand what he's trying to do. All literary modernists were trying to create Wagner in literature.>I shall present the discovery of Time regained in the sensations induced by the spoon, the tea, etc., as an illumination à la Parsifalhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPPk5Guqo2g
>>23367599Mein KampfLuther's treatise on Jews Culture of Critique Then just don't read Proust
Read Proust first. You don't need any prerequisites.Afterwards:Mémoires d'outre-tombe by ChateaubriandBergson's writings on memory
I suppose it couldn't hurt to read up on some French history beforehand (specifically the Dreyfus Affair), but Proust is really his own thing. Unlike philosophy or certain literary traditions you don't need to "start with the Greeks" or anything like that, just start reading Proust and pick up the threads from there
>>23367599If you want to read Proust, just read Proust. Literature isn't like a video game where you need to grind low-level authors first.
>>23367599Racine's plays and Arabian Nights would be good, he refers to them constantly throughout
>>23367973I would add a few Anatol France novels into the mix, as well as Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parna
>>23367973Also Hardy
>>23367599The Talmud.
He's the only gay jew I respect.
>>23367599This >>23367973 seems like a good list, Proust also admired George Eliot.
>>23369190The other “female George” (George Sands) also plays a major role in the overture to Swann’s way.
>>23368377>>23367973Impressive. Actually helpful and honest answers here. >>23368047This guy truly gets it though.>>23368250Sort of correct, but you miss out on a lot by just diving right in. That said, giving the Recherche a blind read, going back to read some of the above, and then re-reading the Recherche is probably the best strategy.
>>23369227Kek. The character Bergotte is based on Anatol France, anon. Also, CSK Moncrieff, Proust's best English translator, translated Charterhouse as a kind of warm-up for ROTP, as being the one novel prior (he felt) with characters as full as Proust's. Just defending my supposed want of honesty here.
>>23367599A French language textbook >>23368206>Bergson's writings on memoryI do think reading Bergson first would enhance the experience quite a lot
>>23367599Goncourt journals
If you listen to anons advising you to read x author before Proust because he references it, you'd end up reading the whole French canon. You'll miss on some subtleties if you haven't read Racine, Balzac or Sévigné sure, but as some anons said, Proust stands on its own. His book is self-referential and self-explanatory. If you really wanted to dig on Proust's greatest literary inspirations, Saint-Simon would be a requisite, and his main work isn't even fully translated in English. Don't bother and strat Swann's Way, you'll know in under fifty pages if you catch the drift or if you're getting filtered.
>>23367949this, he wrote in a letter to his friend how he wanted to use sections of a cathedral as chapter titles but came to believe that he would be laughed at by the literary community for being too try hard. he was inspired by ruskin's descriptions of cathedrals in the stones of venice and decided to structure his novel in the form of a cathedral. he nevertheless decided to leave that covered.
>>23367599Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie should be the first or last thing you read before Proust.>For Marcel Proust, Nerval was one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. Proust especially admired Sylvie's exploration of time lost and regained, which would become one of Proust's deepest interests and the dominant theme of his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time. Later, André Breton named Nerval a precursor of Surrealist art, which drew on Nerval's forays into the significance of dreams. For his part, Antonin Artaud compared Nerval's visionary poetry to the work of Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Van Gogh.
On Reading by Proust
>>23367949>>23367599If you're interested in what he liked, I would definitely add Racine, Anatole France and Madame de Sévigné
>>23369196Not a major role at all. He just mentions his grandma made him read some of her books when she was young.
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