This study explores the surprising relationship between Proust’s creative genius, his financial extravagance, and the steady hand that kept him afloat. What Marcel Proust wanted from life most of all was unconditional requited love, and the way he went after it—smothering the objects of his affection with gifts—cost him a fortune. To pay for such extravagance, he engaged in daring speculations on the stock exchange. The task of his cousin and financial adviser, Lionel Hauser, was to make sure these speculations would not go sour. In Proust and His Banker, Gian Balsamo examines this vital, complex relationship and reveals that the author’s liberal squandering of money provided the grist for many of the fictional characters and dramatic events he wrote about. Focusing on hundreds of letters between Proust and Hauser among other archival and primary sources, Balsamo provides a fascinating window into the writer’s creative process, his financial activities, and the surprising relationship between the two. Successes and failures alike provided material for Proust’s fiction, whether from the purchase of an airplane for the object of his affections or the investigation of a deceased love’s intimate background. Over the course of their fifteen-year collaboration, the banker saw Proust squander three-fifths of his wealth. To Hauser the writer was a virtuoso in resource mismanagement. Nonetheless, Balsamo shows, we owe it to the altruism of this generous relative, who never thought twice about sacrificing his own time and resources to Proust, that In Search of Lost Time was ever completed.
In his study of negative existence and how it affects James Joyce's principal characters, Gian Balsamo joins the ongoing debate about the Irish writer's relationship to Dante and considers the centrality of messianism to that relationship. Finding in Dante a negative poetics that becomes a model for Joyce, Balsamo suggests that the inception and cessation of life - two occurrences that conventionally are deemed impossible to experience personally and directly - typically frame the existential experiences of Joyce's main characters. Balsamo perceives Stephen, Leopold, and Shem as messianic figures because they rebel against this convention, clustering their lives around the very events of inception and burial. Balsamo traces the engagement of each of the three characters in a negative existence immune from the rules and limitations of ordinary experience. Each struggles to express rather than exorcise the fecundity of his own mortality; each reinvents his biography as involving the pivotal transaction of one death - be it a mother's, a son's, or even that of his own body - in return for catharsis. Durkheim, and Noam Chomsky, Balsamo challenges the current debate by identifying the messianic thread that ties together the biographies of Joyce's three characters. Faced with the fissure between history and poetic vocation, Stephen embraces the sacrificial poetry of silence. Faced with the domestic squalor provoked by the loss of his son, Leopold renews at every meal the cathartic exchange of food and semen. Faced with a destiny of death and decomposition, Shem reenacts the tradition of the medieval cycle drama, stretching his own body like a parchment on a cross and then rubricating it like a sacred manuscript.
Balsamo's "Rituals of Literature" is devoted to Joyce's and Dante's special contributions to he tradition of Christian epics, born out of Biblical stories and Homeric poems. By highlighting the integrated nature of its typical tropes, Joyce and Danteestablish the historical identity of the Christian epic as a distinct literary genre.
Based on the thesis that lineage and family succession are endemically exposed to spurious and collateral ramifications, it engages genealogy as a construct, whose architecture is best exemplified in the trope of the genealogical tree: a modular assemblage of filiations whose branches, apparently all-inclusive, hide the intricacy of exclusion, suppression, discrimination, abusive graftings."--BOOK JACKET.
In his study of negative existence and how it affects James Joyce's principal characters, Gian Balsamo joins the ongoing debate about the Irish writer's relationship to Dante and considers the centrality of messianism to that relationship. Finding in Dante a negative poetics that becomes a model for Joyce, Balsamo suggests that the inception and cessation of life - two occurrences that conventionally are deemed impossible to experience personally and directly - typically frame the existential experiences of Joyce's main characters. Balsamo perceives Stephen, Leopold, and Shem as messianic figures because they rebel against this convention, clustering their lives around the very events of inception and burial. Balsamo traces the engagement of each of the three characters in a negative existence immune from the rules and limitations of ordinary experience. Each struggles to express rather than exorcise the fecundity of his own mortality; each reinvents his biography as involving the pivotal transaction of one death - be it a mother's, a son's, or even that of his own body - in return for catharsis. Durkheim, and Noam Chomsky, Balsamo challenges the current debate by identifying the messianic thread that ties together the biographies of Joyce's three characters. Faced with the fissure between history and poetic vocation, Stephen embraces the sacrificial poetry of silence. Faced with the domestic squalor provoked by the loss of his son, Leopold renews at every meal the cathartic exchange of food and semen. Faced with a destiny of death and decomposition, Shem reenacts the tradition of the medieval cycle drama, stretching his own body like a parchment on a cross and then rubricating it like a sacred manuscript.
This study explores the surprising relationship between Proust’s creative genius, his financial extravagance, and the steady hand that kept him afloat. What Marcel Proust wanted from life most of all was unconditional requited love, and the way he went after it—smothering the objects of his affection with gifts—cost him a fortune. To pay for such extravagance, he engaged in daring speculations on the stock exchange. The task of his cousin and financial adviser, Lionel Hauser, was to make sure these speculations would not go sour. In Proust and His Banker, Gian Balsamo examines this vital, complex relationship and reveals that the author’s liberal squandering of money provided the grist for many of the fictional characters and dramatic events he wrote about. Focusing on hundreds of letters between Proust and Hauser among other archival and primary sources, Balsamo provides a fascinating window into the writer’s creative process, his financial activities, and the surprising relationship between the two. Successes and failures alike provided material for Proust’s fiction, whether from the purchase of an airplane for the object of his affections or the investigation of a deceased love’s intimate background. Over the course of their fifteen-year collaboration, the banker saw Proust squander three-fifths of his wealth. To Hauser the writer was a virtuoso in resource mismanagement. Nonetheless, Balsamo shows, we owe it to the altruism of this generous relative, who never thought twice about sacrificing his own time and resources to Proust, that In Search of Lost Time was ever completed.
Based on the thesis that lineage and family succession are endemically exposed to spurious and collateral ramifications, it engages genealogy as a construct, whose architecture is best exemplified in the trope of the genealogical tree: a modular assemblage of filiations whose branches, apparently all-inclusive, hide the intricacy of exclusion, suppression, discrimination, abusive graftings."--BOOK JACKET.
Balsamo's "Rituals of Literature" is devoted to Joyce's and Dante's special contributions to he tradition of Christian epics, born out of Biblical stories and Homeric poems. By highlighting the integrated nature of its typical tropes, Joyce and Danteestablish the historical identity of the Christian epic as a distinct literary genre.
The first of a series on European Union Law, it provides a detailed overview of the development of a new European Common Law. The authors deal with the transposition of concepts and the problem of translation. Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliography in Italian as well as in English, French and German suggesting further reading in each area.
A critical translation of the unabridged Italian text of Domenico Bernini's biography of his father, seventeenth-century sculptor, architect, painter, and playwright Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). Includes commentary on the author's data and interpretations, contrasting them with other contemporary primary sources and recent scholarship"--Provided by publisher.
Milan, spring 1967. 12 counsellors have to decide the future of a great area in a very serious state of decay in the northern suburbs of Milan. The only one who is against the building plan is the Architect, who is convinced that the best strategic choice is a different project, which has its reasons rooted in the past when the area belonged to the Great Forest-a magic place made of wide grass, great rivers, lush vegetation and animals, now extinct. There begins the journey through the history of Milan and its land, from the foundation by the Celts with the name Medhelan (literally holy place) to the present, mixing real historical characters with fantasy characters from the animal and plant kingdom, witnesses of earth’s transformation over centuries detailing its long battle between Nature and Civilisation, or in other words, when the relationship of man-universe-nature broke. We meet the Celtic King Belloveso, Federico Barbarossa, Francesco Sforza and Ludovico il Moro, in the court of whom there is also Leonardo da Vinci, Etherna, the guardian oak of millennial knowledge Asio the howl, wise chief of the Great Forest, with his loyal crow Barone Rook and Apodeus, the brown mouse that with cleverness beats the black mice troops, the plague carriers. But the Architect’s reasons cannot convince the majority of the counsellors to abandon the idea of the building plan, until something that will forever change the destiny of that area happens... Milan, spring 2015. A Photoreporter of the New York Times goes to Milan for a special report for the Expo 2015: there’s one of the former counsellors from 48 years ago and the story that he chooses to tell is the best example he knows of how Feeding the Planet. He tells about a man and his greatest fulfilment, which is something very similar to the Great Forest of 2500 years ago...
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