Michael Sprinker

No major writer of the twentieth century seems a less likely candidate for Marxist analysis than Marcel Proust. A wealthy dilettante and notable fixture in the Parisian salons, Proust chronicled and anatomized the world of France's upper classes, earning a reputation among both contemporaries and subsequent generations for aesthetic refinement and social snobbery.Yet in a reconsideration of Proust's masterpiece, A Ia recherche du temps perdu, Michael Sprinker reveals Proust to be an acute observer of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and aristocracy in the Third Republic. Drawing on historical scholarship on the Third Republic, Sprinker shows how Proust's novel can extend our understanding of this period, particularly in areas less well mapped in standard historical studies such as nationalist ideology and gender roles.

This critical reinterpretation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past offers a fresh, socio-historical analysis of the novel. Departing from the more formalist and rhetorical trends in recent Proust criticism, Michael Sprinker draws upon historical scholarship to assess Proust's portrait of French society, and shows that the novel's account of the class structure and rivalries between the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie during the first half-century of the Third French Republic was both precise and critically engaged. He argues that in other areas, notably the nature of nationalist sentiment and gender ideology, Proust offers insight into phenomena studied only in fragmentary ways in previous historical writing on this crucial period. His study provides an original approach in its combination of history and literature, and is the most thorough work of Marxist criticism on Proust to date.

This book sets out to clarify the nature of the aesthetic as a category within the theory of historical materialism. It opens with an analysis of Marx's brief discussion of Greek art in the Grundrisse, moves through a series of readings of specifically bourgeois texts, including those of Ruskin, G.M. Hopkins, Nietzsche and Henry James, and then to the terrain of Marxism in the concepts of history underwriting the work of Fredric Jameson and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sprinkler detours through the recent works of Perry Anderson to set the stage for a systematic consideration of the theoretical itinerary and continuing relevance of the contributions of Louis Althusser.Imaginary Relations is a cogently argued attempt to shift the terrain of Marxist theorizing about art from the domain of ideology considered as simply false consciousness to a concept of art which makes aesthetic texts sources of empirical data about the real, historical world.