This is the first book-length comparison of the narrative techniques of Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett. This study is an important contribution to critical literature, and offers fresh perspectives on the crucial importance of the Recherche and Beckett's trilogy: Molloy, Malone dies, and The Unnamable in the context of the twentieth-century novel.

This a comprehensive comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century's most important writers of prose. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and close readings of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, James H. Reid compares the two novelists' use of first-person narration in constructing and demystifying fictions of consciousness. Reid focuses on the narrator's search to represent the voice that speaks the novel, a search, he argues, that structures first-person narration in the works of both novelists. He examines in detail the significant impact of Proust's writing on Beckett's own work as well as Beckett's subtle reworkings of Proust's themes and strategies. This study is an important contribution to critical literature, and offers fresh perspectives on the crucial importance of the Recherche and the trilogy in the context of the twentieth-century novel.

A powerful, genre-defying meditation, with Beckett at its origin, that touches on mysteries as varied as literary celebrity, baseball, and why we feel the need to be cruel to one another Following the schema of Samuel Beckett's unpublished "Long Observation of the Ray," of which only six manuscript pages exist, poet and critic Michael Coffey interleaves multiple narratives according to an arithmetic sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes. This rhythm of themes and genres--involving personal memoir, literary criticism, Beckett studies, contemporary political reportage and accounts of state-sponsored torture in appropriated texts, plus an Arabian Tale and even a baseballplay-by-play--produce a work at once sculptural, theatrical, mathematical and above all lyrical, a new form of narrative answering to a freshened rule set. In executing Beckett's most radical undertaking--one scholar referred to "Long Observation of the Ray" as a "monument to extinction"--Coffey gives readers access to an open field in which ruminations on writing mix with an engagement with Beckett scholarship as well as the unsettling chaos in today's world. Although Beckett, like any writer, had his share of abandoned works, he was in the habit of "unabandoning" on occasion. Coffey's effort here salvages a Beckett project from a half-century ago and brings it to the surface, with the contemporary markings of its hauling.

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher is the first book to properly explore Proust from a philosophical angle and argues that the key to understanding Proust is the concept of experience.

Beckett's first 'literary landmark' ( St Petersburg Times) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. When submitted to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky; it was only published posthumously in 1992. As the story begins, Belacqua - a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba - 'wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final "relapse into Dublin"' ( New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, Dream is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.

This book explores the relationship between ekphrasis and memory in the novel. Drawing on À la recherche du temps perdu, Leonid Bilmes considers how Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith and Lydia Davis have employed and reshaped Proust's way of depicting the recollected past. In Ada, Austerlitz, 10:04, How to Be Both and The End of the Story, memory images are variously transposed into intermedial descriptions that inform the narrator's story, just as they serve to shape the reader's own remembrance of each of these narratives. Ekphrasis in the novel after Proust, Bilmes argues, acts as a distinct site within the text where past and present, self and other, image and text, seeing and hearing, are ever on the brink of reconciliation. The book surveys a wide field of critical inquiry, encompassing classical theorizations of ekphrasis, philosophical explorations of memory and visuality, as well as seminal studies of image-text relations by, among others, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jean-Luc Nancy and Liliane Louvel. Bilmes's compelling dialogue with theory and literature evinces the underexplored bond between ekphrasis and memory in the contemporary novel.