The Proustian Mind

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 statured 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 30 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, metaphor and meaning, beauty, love, egoism and solipsism and desire. The final section considers Proust in relation to important philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre 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.