Time Regained: World Literature and Cinema

Description

Awarded the Tudor Vianu Prize for Literary and Cultural Theory by the National Museum of Romanian Literature. Over the past 30 years, the fields of world literature and world cinema have developed on parallel but largely separate tracks, with little recognition of their underlying similarities and the ways that each can learn from the other. Time Regained does not move from literature to cinema, but exists simultaneously in both fields. The 7 filmmakers selected here, Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Raul Ruiz, Wong Kar Wai, Stephen Daldry, and Paolo Sorrentino, are themselves also writers or people with literary training, and they produce a new type of world cinema thanks to their understanding of the world simultaneously through literature and film. In the process, their films produce new readings of literary texts that world literature studies wouldn't have been able to achieve with its own instruments. Time Regained examines how filmmakers build on literature to reconfigure the world as a landscape of dreams and how they use film to reinvent the narrative techniques of the authors on whom they draw. The selected filmmakers draw inspiration from French surrealists, modernists Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Marguerite Yourcenar, and predecessors such as Dante and Cao Xueqin. In the process, these filmmakers cross the borders between film and literature, nation and world, dream and reality.

Delia Ungureanu is Associate Director of Harvard's Institute for World Literature and Associate Professor of literary theory and comparative literature in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She is the author of From Paris to Tloen: Surrealism as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Poetica Apocalipsei: Razboiul cultural in revistele literare romanesti (1944-1947) (2012).

Time Regained reveals the hidden common ground between media, and fields of study, that have often been seen in separate terms. Through illuminating readings of a series of filmmakers who have been deeply engaged with world literature, Delia Ungureanu reveals an intimate connection between film and modern literature, going back to the very origins of cinema and forward into Proust and the surrealists. With fascinating discussions of Proust and Breton's filmic imaginations and of literary filmmakers from Georges Melies to Wong Kar-wai and Martin Scorsese, this brilliant and engaging book opens up new directions for both world literature and film studies today. * David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature Director, Institute for World Literature, Harvard University, USA * Focusing on works by Marcel Proust, Raul Ruiz, Andrei Tarkovsky, Marguerite Yourcenar, Akira Kurosawa, Wong Kar-wai and others, this remarkable book creates a set of cross-media conversations that reach around the world. There is a new artistic adventure to be found on almost every page. * Michael Wood, the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA *