Proustian Passions

A la recherche du temps perdu occupies an undisputed place in the unfolding intellectual history of the 'moi' in France. There is, however, a general tendency in writing on this novel to celebrate the wonders of the moi sensible uncritically. This effaces all that is morally dubious or franklyexperimental about Proust's account of selfhood. It denies the rigour with which Proust tries to understand exactly why it is so difficult to explain one's own actions to another. The great party scenes, for example, or the countless digressions, read like manuals on how acts of self-justificationtake place.Proust, however, is not merely interested in some kind of taxonomy of excuses, hypocrisy, disingenuousness, and Schadenfreude. He wants to know why self-justification tends to be interpreted as indicative of moral or psychological weakness. He asks himself whether self-justification informsisolated moments of everyday existence or whether it endures in an overall conception of self that lasts an individual's lifetime. He investigates whether it dictates the functioning of an entire social group. Can we decide, he asks, whether justifying one's self should be written off as morallyrepugnant, or taken seriously as evidence of moral probity?

A guide to three novels by Marcel Proust containing selections of critical essays, plot summaries for each work, and a biography of Proust.

In Proust’s Songbook, Jennifer Rushworth analyzes and theorizes the presence and role of songs in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Instead of focusing on instrumental music and large-scale forms such as symphonies and opera, as is common in Proust musical studies, Rushworth argues for the centrality of songs and lyrics in Proust’s opus. Her work analyzes the ways in which the author inserted songs at key turning points in his novel and how he drew inspiration from contemporary composers and theorists of song. Rushworth presents detailed readings of five moments of song in À la recherche du temps perdu, highlighting the songs’ significance by paying close attention to their lyrics, music, composers, and histories. Rushworth interprets these episodes through theoretical reflections on song and voice, drawing particularly from the works of Reynaldo Hahn and Roland Barthes. She argues that songs in Proust’s novel are connected and resonate with one another across the different volumes yet also shows how song for Proust is a solo, amateur, and intimate affair. In addition, she points to Proust’s juxtapositions of songs with meditations on the notion of “mauvaise musique” (bad music) to demonstrate the existence of a blurred boundary between songs that are popular and songs that are art. According to Rushworth, a song for Proust has a special relation to repetition and memory due to its typical brevity and that song itself becomes a mode of resistance in À la Recherche—especially on the part of characters in the face of family and familial expectations. She also defines the songs in Proust’s novel as songs of farewell—noting that to sing farewell is a means to resist the very parting that is being expressed—and demonstrates how songs, in formal terms, resist the forward impetus of narrative.

When Marcel Proust started to work on In Search of Lost Time in 1908, he wrote this question in his notebook: ‘Should I make it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?’ Throughout his famous multi-volume work, Proust directly engages several philosophers, and few novels are as thoroughly saturated with philosophical themes and concepts as In Search of Lost Time. The Proustian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the rich philosophical range of Proust’s work and the first major volume of its kind. Including 31 chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into seven clear parts: Proust’s life and works metaphysics and epistemology mind and language aesthetics ethics gender and sexuality predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Within these sections, key Proustian themes are explored from a philosophical standpoint, including time, the self, memory, imagination, jealousy, beauty, love, subjectivity and desire. The final section considers Proust in relation to important philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. The Proustian Mind is essential reading for those studying aesthetics, philosophy of literature, phenomenology and ethics, and will also be of interest to those in literature studying modernism, French literature and the relationship between literature and philosophy.

Adam Watt's critical study of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, focuses on the role of the acts of reading depicted in the seminal novel. Reading is shown to be a formative and often troubling force in the life of the novel's narrator.

Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27) changed the course of modern narrative fiction. This Introduction provides an account of Proust's life, the socio-historical and cultural contexts of his work and an assessment of his early works. At its core is a volume-by-volume study of In Search of Lost Time, which attends to its remarkable superstructure, as well as to individual images and the intricacies of Proust's finely-stitched prose. The book reaches beyond stale commonplaces of madeleines and memory, alerting readers to Proust's verbal virtuosity, his preoccupations with the fleeting and the unforeseeable, with desire, jealousy and the nature of reality. Lively, informative chapters on Proust criticism and the work's afterlives in contemporary culture provide a multitude of paths to follow. The book charges readers with the energy and confidence to move beyond anecdote and hearsay and to read Proust's novel for themselves.

This volume sets Marcel Proust's masterwork, Á la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27), in its cultural and socio-historical contexts. Essays by the leading scholars in the field attend to Proust's biography, his huge correspondence, and the genesis and protracted evolution of his masterpiece. Light is cast on Proust's relation to thinkers and artists of his time, and to those of the great French and European traditions of which he is now so centrally a part. There is vivid exploration of Proust's reading; his attitudes towards contemporary social and political issues; his relation to journalism, religion, sexuality, science and travel, and how these figure in the Recherche. The volume closes with a comprehensive survey of Proust's critical reception, from reviews during his lifetime to the present day, including assessments of Proust in translation and the broader assimilation of his work into twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture.

This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tribute to those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.