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.
Introduction Anna Elsner and Thomas Stern
Part 1: Life and Works
1. Marcel Proust: A Student of Philosophy William Carter
2. Proust’s Philosophical Training Luc Fraisse
Part 2: Metaphysics & Epistemology
3. The Mind in Time: Proust, Involuntary Memory, and the Adventure in Perception Garry L. Hagberg
4. In Search of Lost Place Anna Elsner
5. "Only Through Time Time is Conquered": Proust on Death Andrew Huddleston
6. The Self Ben Colburn
7. Knowledge Adam Watt
8. The Pursuit of Uncertainty: Knowledge, Deferral and Self-Defeat in Proust Richard Moran
Part 3: Mind and Language
9. Memory Simon Kemp
10. Proustian Habit Thomas Stern
11. Subjectivity: A Proustian Problem Robert B. Pippin
12. Speech Michael Lucey
Part 4: Aesthetics
13. Contemplating a Proustian Library Virginie Greene
14. The experience of beauty in Proust – a Freudian account Julia Peters and Anna-Lisa Sander
15. The Arts Jennifer Rushworth
16. Art and the Life-World: The Duck, the Rabbit and the Madeleine Gary Kemp
Part 5: Ethics
17. Proust and the Philosophy of Love Martin Buijs
18. Proust and Lying: Ethics and Aesthetics David Ellison
19. "Each of us is indeed alone": Vulnerability in In Search of Lost Time Roos Slegers
20. Proust’s Abraham, the Other L. Scott Lerner
Part 6: Gender and Sexuality
21. The Logic of Gomorrah: Proust and the Subversion of Identities Justine Balibar
22. Proust on Desire Satisfaction Robbie Kubala
23. Proustian Jealousy Elisabeth Ladenson
Part 7: In conversation with predecessors, contemporaries and successors
24. Proust and Romanticism Michael N. Forster
25. Proust and Schopenhauer David Bather Woods
26. Proust and Bergson: Fierce Criticality Suzanne Guerlac
27. Proust and Nietzsche on Self-Fashioning: Towards a Post-Metaphysical Reading of Proust Antoine Panaioti
28. The alter ego: Merleau-Ponty Anne Simon
29. Proust the Phenomenologist: Sartre and Beauvoir as Readers of Proust Lior Levy
30. Proust-Machine: Gilles Deleuze Thomas Baldwin and Patrick ffrench.
31. Proust and Philosophical Influence Sebastian Gardner
Index
Biography
Anna Elsner is an Assistant Professor of French Literature and Culture at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. She is the co-editor of Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture (2009), Medicine and Literature (forthcoming), and the author of Mourning and Creativity in Proust (2017).
Thomas Stern is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College London, UK. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Ethics (2020), and Philosophy and Theatre (Routledge, 2013), and the editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (2019), and The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting (2017).
"Interdisciplinarity is often praised, less frequently criticized, in both cases irrelevantly, since it so rarely actually exists. The Proustian Mind, which doesn’t just set philosophy and literary studies side by side, but genuinely erases the boundary between them, is a very welcome exception, and one could do far worse than bunker down for a week with it…" - Ben Roth, MIND
"...all of the sections feature countless insights as to Proust's relevance in various dimensions of philosophy..." - Bryan Counter, Studies in the Novel
