Marcel Proust and the Visual Arts

FAIN: FA-11366-76

J. Theodore Johnson, Jr
University of Kansas, Lawrence (Lawrence, KS 66045-7505)

To complete a book on the 20th century French novelist Marcel Proust and his relation to the visual arts entitled Marcel Proust and the Visual Arts. The book will begin with the biographical details that relate Proust to the visual arts and will move to a definition of Proust's general aesthetics relative to reading, painting, and architecture. An extensive third part explores references to the visual arts in Proust's fiction, studies the evolution of specific texts that begin as descriptions of paintings in the early manuscripts, assesses the function of fictional painters within the novel, and establishes the distance between Impressionism and Proust's own style.