506 Pages
by Routledge

506 Pages
by Routledge

506 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

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).

"This volume is a significant compendium not only for students and researchers working in the field of French literature but also those working in philosophy and intellectual history or other literary disciplines." - Francesco Marchionni, French Studies

"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