Monthly Archives: March 2016

Can you use “Proustian moment” in a sentence?

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Ever since someone said that phrase to me in the lobby of the Living Computer Museum in Seattle (a place that offers many such moments for anyone who’s worked in high tech), I’ve been on the lookout for a chance to use it myself. Thanks to Reading Like a Writer, I now can. In the first chapter, where the author is defining “close reading,” she mentions that her French lit classes used an equivalent term: explication de texte. 

And what a delicious Proustian moment it was, to read that phrase. I was swept away, swooning, to a wine-soaked summer French Intensive at UC Santa Cruz–so many, many years ago. Thank you, Francine Prose.

Reading Like a Writer — Francine Prose

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I’m not sure how this book ended up in my reading pile, but it may have been the subtitle: “A guide for people who love books and for those to want to write them.” What kept me reading was the first chapter, “Close Reading,” where I was delighted to discover that Prose and I did our stint in academia around the same time. How strange and wonderful to find a book published in 2006 that unabashedly favors “reading what [is] on the page with only passing reference to the biography of the writer or the period in which the text was written.”

Just to be clear, she’s not trying to make a case for the return of the New Criticism, or deny the validity of social or political context. What she is trying to do is answer the question that begins this book: “Can creative writing be taught?” And “close reading” is what she offers as an answer.

So I really wanted to like this book. But the author made it very difficult.

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