Regarding Lost Time
Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes

Katja Haustein

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Legenda (General Series)

Legenda

30 January 2012  •  206pp

ISBN: 978-1-907747-91-5 (hardback)  •  RRP £80, $110, €95

FrenchGermanArtPhilosophyLife-Writing

What is autobiography and how does it transform in the age of technological reproducibility? Katja Haustein discusses this question as it relates to photography and the role of emotions in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1909-22), Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932-38), and Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes (1977) and Camera Lucida (1980). In this first book-length comparative analysis of these authors, Haustein maps their most famous works against little-studied material, some of which has only recently become available: seminar manuscripts such as Barthes’s La Préparation du roman (1978-80), radio recordings, letters and diaries. In this way her study opens new avenues in scholarship on three eminent twentieth-century writers and contributes to a new field of enquiry: the history of autobiography in the light of a history of looking.

Katja Haustein is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at Churchill College, Cambridge.

Reviews:

  • ‘Katja Haustein’s monograph charts new territory in the expanding study of autobiographical writing in the light of photography... this volume will no doubt be of great benefit to specialists of these three seminal authors, as well as to those working in comparative studies.’ — Kathrin Yacavone, French Studies 67.2 (April 2013), 271-72
  • ‘Katja Haustein undertakes a titanic task: to bring together three bulwarks of twentieth-century intellect, each one so seminal in their own right that even the thought of combining them in one study would seem quixotic. Haustein not only accomplishes the task, but manages to bring out a genuinely comparative account... it is a very useful book to have read, and one which, I am certain, I will return to again and again.’ — Eleni Papargyriou, Comparative Critical Studies 10, 2013, 407-09
  • ‘This book contains several beautiful, thoughtfully chosen illustrations, and is a useful source of information about scholarship in German on Proust... a significant and stimulating contribution to the scholarship on these three important writers.’ — Áine Larkin, Modern Language Review 110.1, January 2015, 228-29 (full text online)

Bibliography entry:

Haustein, Katja, Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes (Legenda, 2012)

First footnote reference: 35 Katja Haustein, Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes (Legenda, 2012), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Haustein, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Haustein, Katja. 2012. Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Haustein 2012: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Haustein 2012: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

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