1887
Volume 45, Issue 1
  • ISSN 0035-3906
  • E-ISSN: 1600-0811
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Abstract

E.M. Cioran’s ideas about disappointment illuminate the role of deception in the aesthetics of Marcel Proust. With reference to the narrator’s experience watching the actress la Berma, I show that the desire to know is at the heart of deception in both writers, and that disappointment is not a failure but rather a necessary step on the way to lucidity. This initial despair-laden lucidity then yields, in both writers, to a second kind of lucidity that, in the pessimist tradition, seeks passion in life within a fiction that can modify our expectations so that a non-deceptive and undespairing lucidity arises within the domain of the aesthetic.

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/content/journals/10.1075/rro.45.1.07acq
2010-01-01
2025-02-19
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): Cioran; déception; esthétique; lucidité; pessimisme; Proust
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