The Proustian Mind by Elsner, Anna; Stern, Thomas;

Short description:

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. Includes 30 chapters by an international team of contributors.

Long description:

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.

"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

Table of Contents:

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