Böcker av Christopher Prendergast

A lifetime's reading of Proust's masterpiece

Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives developed in and around the work of Barthes, Kristeva, Genette and Derrida, Dr Prendergast explores approaches to the concept of mimesis and relates these to a number of narrative texts produced in the period which literary history familiarly designates as the age of realism.

Adventures in Grammarland is set in a fantasy world, where words are people and where, because of bitter conflict and disunity in the past, the land is now oppressed by the tyrant Ignorance. A young lad, Josh, embarks on a quest in Grammarland that requires him to grasp the rules of grammar, to understand why the rules are so important and to face Ignorance, and his two sons Bigotry and Prejudice, in a final, cataclysmic battle that will seal the fate of Grammarland once and for all. On the way, he must cross the Bog of Disuse (where old words sink without trace) and deal with the foul-mouthed Giant Oath, the well-meaning but incoherent Misuse, and the Tautology family including Tautology's wife Verbiage, and their children Digression and Drivel. On the journey, Josh is accompanied by Syntax, who is a stickler for the rules of Grammarland, and Melisa, who understands the rules but also knows how to play with them constructively. Adventures in Grammarland turns what many see as a dry and obscure subject into an exciting adventure. The reader meets all the parts of speech and is shown how, when the words work together, they become more powerful than any enemy. This is a book for anyone, from the age of 9 to 90, who enjoys an exciting story, especially if they have an interest in language.

Marcel Proust was long the object of a cult in which the main point of reading his great novel In Search of Lost Time was to find, with its narrator, a redemptive epiphany in a pastry and a cup of lime-blossom tea. We now live in less confident times, in ways that place great strain on the assumptions and beliefs that made those earlier readings possible. This has led to a new manner of reading Proust, against the grain. In Mirages and Mad Beliefs, Christopher Prendergast argues the case differently, with the grain, on the basis that Proust himself was prey to self-doubt and found numerous, if indirect, ways of letting us know. Prendergast traces in detail the locations and forms of a quietly nondogmatic yet insistently skeptical voice that questions the redemptive aesthetic the novel is so often taken to celebrate, bringing the reader to wonder whether that aesthetic is but another instance of the mirage or the mad belief that, in other guises, figures prominently in In Search of Lost Time. In tracing the modalities of this self-pressuring voice, Prendergast ranges far and wide, across a multiplicity of ideas, themes, sources, and stylistic registers in Proust's literary thought and writing practice, attentive at every point to inflections of detail, in a sustained account of Proust the skeptic for the contemporary reader.

Moving deftly among literary and visual arts, as well as the modern critical canon, Christopher Prendergast's book explores the meaning and value of representation as both a philosophical challenge (What does it mean to create an image that "e;stands for"e; something absent?) and a political issue (Who has the right to represent whom?).The Triangle of Representation raises a range of theoretical, historical, and aesthetic questions, and offers subtle readings of such cultural critics as Raymond Williams, Paul de Man, Edward Said, Walter Benjamin, and Helene Cixous, in addition to penetrating investigations of visual artists like Gros, Ingres, and Matisse and significant insights into Proust and the onus of translating him. Above all, Prendergast's work is a striking display of how a firm grounding in theory is essential for the exploration of art and literature.

This study centres on the hypothesis that, as first claimed by historian Louis Chevalier, Eugene Sue's "Les Mysteres de Paris", through pressure from Sue's reader-correspondents as he wrote and published the novel in serial form, was a collective production.

Septembers, Chris Prendergast's first novel, is a simmering tale of burning monuments, bad decisions and growing anger.

From the author of "The Order of Mimesis" and "Paris and the Nineteenth-Century", this book provides a collection of essays on Raymond William's theories of cultural materialism.