PROUST: SWANN S WAY

This class is organised around one book, Swann’s Way, volume one of Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, a work that is central to the history of the novel. Due to the length and complexity of the six volumes that make up In Search of Lost Time, it is not a novel that benefits from a schematic reading. It calls, instead, on our attention to be paid in an unusually close manner. It is a novel that is committed to the details, to close observation and the expansive and meditative nature of the life of the mind. Therefore, as well as being about Proust’s work, the class is also concerned with questions of attention. As Adorno argued, In Search of Lost Time is a book that is “against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced on from above…”

Students will get a chance to read Swann’s Way—a book that is just under 500 pages long—in great depth over the course of the semester. And because the adjective “Proustian”, it could be argued, has come to refer to works that have both succeeded as well as preceded Proust himself, students will be introduced to works by authors who might have influenced Proust — such as: Baudelaire, Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin and Ralph Waldo Emerson — as well as examples of writers who had been inspired by Proust’s work — such as: Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Javier Marias, Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. Creative and analytic close reading will be the primary tool of analysis.