Richard E. Goodkin – författare

A study in obsession, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is seemingly a self-sufficient universe of remarkable internal consistency and yet is full of complex, gargantuan digressions. Richard Goodkin follows the dual spirit of the novel through highly suggestive readings of the work in its interactions with music, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cinema, and such literary genres as epic, lyric poetry, and tragedy. In exploring this fascinating intertextual network, Goodkin reveals some of Proust's less obvious creative sources and considers his influence on later art forms. The artistic and intellectual entities examined in relation to Proust's novel are extremely diverse, coming from periods ranging from antiquity (Homer, Zeno of Elea) to the 1950s (Hitchcock) and belonging to the cultures of the Greek, French, German, and English-speaking worlds. In spite of this variety of form and perspective, all of these analyses share a common methodology, that of "digressive" reading.They explore Proust's novel not only in light of such famous passages as those of the madeleine and the good-night kiss, but also on the basis of seemingly small details that ultimately take us, like the novel itself, in unexpected directions.

The classical period in France presents a particularly lively battleground for the transition between oral-visual culture, on the one hand, and print culture on the other. The former depended on learning from sources of knowledge directly, in their presence, in a manner analogous to theatrical experience. The latter became characterized by the distance and abstraction of reading. How Do I Know Thee? explores the ways in which literature, philosophy, and psychology approach social cognition, or how we come to know others. Richard E. Goodkin describes a central opposition between what he calls “theatrical cognition” and “narrative cognition,” drawing both on scholarship on literary genre and mode, and also on the work of a number of philosophers and psychologists, in particular Descartes’s theory of cognition, Freudian psychoanalysis, mid?twentieth?century behaviorism, and the field of cognitive science. The result is a study that will be of interest not only to students of the classical period but also to those in the corresponding disciplines.

The classical period in France presents a particularly lively battleground for the transition between oral-visual culture, on the one hand, and print culture on the other. The former depended on learning from sources of knowledge directly, in their presence, in a manner analogous to theatrical experience. The latter became characterized by the distance and abstraction of reading. How Do I Know Thee? explores the ways in which literature, philosophy, and psychology approach social cognition, or how we come to know others. Richard E. Goodkin describes a central opposition between what he calls “theatrical cognition” and “narrative cognition,” drawing both on scholarship on literary genre and mode, and also on the work of a number of philosophers and psychologists, in particular Descartes’s theory of cognition, Freudian psychoanalysis, mid?twentieth?century behaviorism, and the field of cognitive science. The result is a study that will be of interest not only to students of the classical period but also to those in the corresponding disciplines.

Through a study of the evolution of inheritance issues in seventeen tragedies written over the course of half a century the Corneille brothers, Pierre and Thomas, and by Jean Racine, Richard E. Goodkin questions the pervasive assumption that classical tragedy, a form written for the aristocracy, is informed exclusively by an aristocratic ethic.Instead, a fresh reading of both canonical and noncanonical texts demonstrates that even the most formal body of literature produced by French classical writers expresses a conflict between a declining aristocratic hierarchy based on inherited privilege and a rising capitalistic ethic that favors competition and enterprise.