A surname or family name is a name added to a given name. In many cases, a surname is a family name and many dictionaries define "surname" as a synonym of "family name". In the western hemisphere, it is commonly synonymous with last name because it is usually placed at the end of a person's given name.
In most Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries, two or more last names (or surnames) may be used. In China, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Madagascar, Taiwan, Vietnam, and parts of India, the family name is placed before a person's given name.
The style of having both a family name (surname) and a given name (forename) is far from universal. In many countries, it is common for ordinary people to have only one name or mononym.
The concept of a "surname" is a relatively recent historical development, evolving from a medieval naming practice called a "byname". Based on an individual's occupation or area of residence, a byname would be used in situations where more than one person had the same name.
Samuel Beckett's essay Proust, from 1930, is an aesthetic and epistemological manifesto, which is more concerned with Beckett's influences and preoccupations than with its ostensible subject.
Beckett wrote Proust in the summer of 1930, in response to a commission precipitated by Thomas MacGreevy, Charles Prentice, and Richard Aldington, during his stay at the École Normale in Paris. By the end of September, he delivered it by hand to Charles Prentice at Chatto and Windus. The book sold 2,600 copies by 1937, with the remaining 400 remaindered by 1941. In retrospect, Beckett dismissed it as written in “cheap flashy philosophical jargon.”
The essay served double duty as its author’s aesthetic and epistemological manifesto, proclaiming on behalf of its ostensible subject: “We cannot know and we cannot be known.” In dense and allusive language, Beckett credited his current influences (notably Schopenhauer and Calderón) and forecast his future preoccupations, reading them into the prose of Marcel Proust:
Proust commonly refers to the French author Marcel Proust (1871–1922).
Proust may also refer to:
To what do you not drive
Mortal hearts
Accursed hunger for gold?
Cheaply bought, but deadly sold
With new light they shine on through
On fields of shredded goals
Reap crop of clinging hope
Harvest our brave new world
Ancient woe, be gone
Foul illusions of better life
Compared to what, I ask
Does this truth of life coerce?
Juxtaposed they are not