Time Regained: World Literature and Cinema

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, Raúl Ruíz, 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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction: The Fabric of Dreams 1. From Automaton to Movie Camera: Méliès, Selznick, Scorsese 2. The Vast Structure of Recollection: Tarkovsky, Proust, Yourcenar 3. In that Sleep of Death what Dreams May Come: Van Gogh, Kurosawa, Yourcenar 4. The Dark Hollow at the Back of the Head: Woolf and Daldry 5. In the Paradise of Trapdoors: Proust, André Breton, and Raúl Ruiz 6. Dream of the Red Chamber 2046: Cao Xueqin and Wong Kar-wai 7. Let This Novel Begin: Sorrentino and Proust Conclusion: The Art of Time Regained: To Be Continued Bibliography

About the Author :
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 Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Poetica Apocalipsei: Razboiul cultural în revistele literare românesti (1944–1947) (2012).

Review :
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 Méliès to Wong Kar-wai and Martin Scorsese, this brilliant and engaging book opens up new directions for both world literature and film studies today. Focusing on works by Marcel Proust, Raúl 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.