Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives

265 Pages·2022·9.595 MB·English

by  Katherine Elkins

PROUST’S IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
oxford studies in philosophy and literature
Richard Eldridge, Philosophy, Swarthmore College
editorial board
Anthony J. Cascardi, Comparative Literature, Romance, Languages, and Rhetoric,
University of California, Berkeley
David Damrosch, Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Moira Gatens, Philosophy, University of Sydney
Garry Hagberg, Philosophy, Bard College
Philip Kitcher, Philosophy, Columbia University
Joshua Landy, French and Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Toril Moi, Literature, Romance Studies, Philosophy, and Theater Studies, Duke University
Martha C. Nussbaum, Philosophy and Law School, University of Chicago
Bernard Rhie, English, Williams College
David Wellbery, Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Committee on Social
Thought, University of Chicago
Paul Woodruff, Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at Austin
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Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives
Edited by Katherine Elkins
PROUST’S IN SEARCH
OF LOST TIME
Philosophical Perspectives
Edited by Katherine Elkins
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Elkins, Katherine L., author.
Title: Proust’s In search of lost time : philosophical perspectives /
Katherine Elkins.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Series: Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022012635 (print) | LCCN 2022012636 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190921583 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190921576 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780190921606 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922. À la recherche du temps perdu. |
Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922—Philosophy. | Philosophy in literature. |
LCGFT: Literary criticism.
Classification: LCC PQ2631 .R63 A8627 2023 (print) |
LCC PQ2631. R63 (ebook) | DDC 843/.912—dc23/eng/20220321
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012635
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012636
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780190921576.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
CONTENTS
Series Editor’s Foreword vii
Contributors xi
Introduction 1
Katherine Elkins
1. Why a Novel? 19
Joshua Landy
2. Biography: Proust’s Parallel Lives 47
Elisabeth A. Ladenson
3. The Origins and Ends of Music: Proust Counters
Rousseau 79
Christie McDonald
4. Proust’s Intermittent Seriality, or What Is a Literary
Event? 104
Patrick Bray
v
Contents
5. Swann’s Medical Philosophy 124
Richard Moran
6. The Shadow of Love: The Role of Jealousy in Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu 157
Robert B. Pippin
7. In Search of Lost Weather 191
Dora Zhang
8. Proust’s Consciousness 217
Katherine Elkins
Index 245
vi
SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
At least since Plato had Socrates criticize the poets and attempt to
displace Homer as the authoritative articulator and transmitter of
human experience and values, philosophy and literature have de-
veloped as partly competing, partly complementary enterprises.
Both literary writers and philosophers have frequently studied
and commented on each other’s texts and ideas, sometimes with
approval, sometimes with disapproval, in their efforts to become
clearer about human life and about valuable commitments–– moral,
artistic, political, epistemic, metaphysical, and religious, as may be.
Plato’s texts themselves register the complexity and importance of
these interactions in being dialogues in which both deductive argu-
mentation and dramatic narration do central work in furthering a
complex body of views.
While these relations have been widely recognized, they have
also frequently been ignored or misunderstood, as academic discip-
lines have gone their separate ways within their modern institutional
settings. Philosophy has often turned to science or mathematics as
providing models of knowledge; in doing so it has often explicitly set
vii
series editor’s Foreword
itself against cultural entanglements and literary devices, rejecting,
at least officially, the importance of plot, figuration, and imagery
in favor of supposedly plain speech about the truth. Literary study
has moved variously through formalism, structuralism, poststruc-
turalism, and cultural studies, among other movements, as modes
of approach to a literary text. In doing so it has understood literary
texts as sample instances of images, structures, personal styles, or
failures of consciousness, or it has seen the literary text as a largely
fungible product, fundamentally shaped by wider pressures and
patterns of consumption and expectation that affect and figure in
nonliterary textual production as well. It has thus set itself against
the idea that major literary texts productively and originally ad-
dress philosophical problems of value and commitment precisely
through their form, diction, imagery, and development, even while
these works also resist claiming conclusively to solve the problems
that occupy them.
These distinct academic traditions have yielded important
perspectives and insights. But in the end none of them has been
kind to the idea of major literary works as achievements in thinking
about values and human life, often in distinctive, open, self- revising,
self- critical ways. At the same time readers outside institutional
settings, and often enough philosophers and literary scholars, too,
have turned to major literary texts precisely in order to engage
with their productive, materially and medially specific patterns and
processes of thinking. These turns to literature have, however, not so
far been systematically encouraged within disciplines, and they have
generally occurred independently of each other.
The aim of this series is to make manifest the multiple, complex
engagements with philosophical ideas and problems that lie at the
hearts of major literary texts. In doing so, its volumes aim not only
to help philosophers and literary scholars of various kinds to find
viii
series editor’s Foreword
rich affinities and provocations to further thought and work, they
also aim to bridge various gaps between academic disciplines and
between those disciplines and the experiences of extrainstitutional
readers.
Each volume focuses on a single, undisputedly major literary
text. Both philosophers with training and experience in literary study
and literary scholars with training and experience in philosophy are
invited to engage with themes, details, images, and incidents in the
focal text, through which philosophical problems are held in view,
worried at, and reformulated. Decidedly not a project simply to for-
mulate A’s philosophy of X as a finished product, merely illustrated
in the text, and decidedly not a project to explain the literary work
entirely by reference to external social configurations and forces, the
effort is instead to track the work of open thinking in literary forms,
as they lie both neighbor to and aslant from philosophy. As Walter
Benjamin once wrote, “new centers of reflection are continually
forming,” as problems of commitment and value of all kinds take
on new shapes for human agents in relation to changing historical
circumstances, where reflective address remains possible. By con-
sidering how such centers of reflection are formed and expressed
in and through literary works, as they engage with philosophical
problems of agency, knowledge, commitment, and value, these
volumes undertake to present both literature and philosophy as, at
times, productive forms of reflective, medial work in relation both
to each other and to social circumstances and to show how this work
is specifically undertaken and developed in distinctive and original
ways in exemplary works of literary art.
Richard Eldridge
Swarthmore College
ix