Reading Proust: Perspective & Plurality

Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-1927) is celebrated as a modernist masterpiece, but reading it poses very considerable challenges – not least in terms of length and style.

This lecture provides an overview of Proust’s novel and suggests that, a century after Proust’s death in 1922, we might better rise to the challenges of In Search of Lost Time by thinking about it through the prism of two related notions: perspective and plurality. As the lecture will show, Proust’s novel is a monumental first-person narrative yet it is far from monolithic.

Adam Watt, Professor of French & Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter