Proust’s handwriting, Auden’s syllabus
Pages from the working notebooks, the “Cahiers,” are written in fluid, all but illegible script, suggesting that Proust wrote quickly and easily. He wrote in lined notebooks, with double-lined red margins, where you sometimes find the absent-minded doodling of the author; at other times, he seems to be elaborating on the things he has set down. On one notebook page, he’s drawn a kind of surrealist collage of portraits (Proust looks to have been a capable, imaginative draftsman) that blend into one another, and which may offer clues to the way he conceived of his novel: an amalgam of people he knew in life, dismantled and reassembled to form the characters of his fiction.
Which reminds us that we’re reading Proust this year.
Read The Thrill of Proust’s Handwriting. Thanks to Butch for the alert.
And check out the syllabus for English 135: Fate and the Individual in European Literature, a class taught by W. H. Auden. (Thanks, Chus!)
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
April 5th, 2013 at 09:15
Seeing the syllabus made me miss going to the library.
April 5th, 2013 at 11:28
ruth: Most if not all of the books in the Required Reading list can be read free on the Internet.