Talk by Eric Karpeles '76, Artist and Author

Talk by Eric Karpeles '76, Artist and Authorhttp://www.haverford.edu/calendar/details/77242Chase Auditorium2008-11-07T16:30:002008-11-07T18:00:00

Chase Auditorium

“My Book is a Painting”

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Description

The Program in Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr and Haverford and the Department of French at Bryn Mawr, in conjunction with the Distinguished Visitors Committee present a talk by Eric Karpeles '76, artist and author of Paintings in Proust. Karpeles will give a talk titled "My Book is a Painting".

Tea at 4:15 p.m.

Eric Karpeles '76 is a painter and he has just published a guide to the painterly discourse in Marcel Proust’s multivolume novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, known in English translation as In Search of Lost Time/ Remembrance of Things Past.  The title of Eric’s compendium is Paintings in Proust (Thames and Hudson, 2008).  In this handsomely produced volume Eric presents over two hundred color images of paintings referenced in Proust, accompanied on facing pages by citations from the relevant passages in the English translation (see article in the Sunday New York Times).  As one reviewer notes:  “On one level, change is the novel's only constant, but on another, it is countered throughout by a desire to capture and describe the reality of fleeting moments. Leafing through Paintings in Proust shows how the epic search for ‘lost time’ is implicated in the way Proust looked at painting, as something that opposes the flow of the novel, a resistance to the unstoppable ebb of time and change” (Barry McCrae, The Irish Times).

Karpeles offers a visual feast analogous to Proust’s scopic pleasure, which holds out the promise of recovering the past as an image. Non-specialists will find Eric’s talk accessible, and he will hew closely to the visual worlds represented in the novel. While interest in Proust is remarkably vigorous and varied, as indicated by such recent titles as, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer and How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton, Eric’s presentation will serve as “an intelligent and passionate introduction from a painter who deeply understands Proust, a collection of sumptuous reproductions of paintings from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, and a window into Proust's sharp, eccentric wit” (MacCrae).

For More Info

Israel Burshatin
610-896-1065
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