In Search of Lost Time

Catalog description

We will read Proust (in translation) as he should be read: hedonistically—with respect and admiration but also with delectation. A prodigious novel of more than 4,000 pages, In Search of Lost Time is one of modern literature’s most challenging and deeply pleasurable reads. The richest of the themes it explores is desire—its remembrance, transformation, perversion, defeat, and final resurgence in the form of art. Often said to be the first modern fiction, In Search of Lost Time is still unparalleled in how it combines finesse and wit with raw emotion, self-examination with social history, profound psychological acuity with a dazzling portrait of the French beau monde at the outset of modernity, how it merges an audacious explosion of literary form with explorations of memory, attachment, deception, lust, jealousy, ambition, and disappointment. Although Marcel Proust (1871–1922) is often cited as France’s greatest novelist (and the novelist’s novelist), his prose is so layered and brilliant that, unfortunately, many readers begin at the beginning and never move past the first fifty pages, reading the same gorgeous sentences again and again. But while In Search of Lost Time’s prose style may have been its most radical contribution to the art of fiction, its vast, thrilling architecture cannot be understood until it has been read once in its entirety. In this intensive class, we will move at a brisk pace through the work, merely glancing at its riches on our way, until we arrive at the uniquely euphoric experience of reading the final volume, when we begin to understand the extraordinarily intimate relationship Proust creates with his reader. In-class creative writing exercises are designed to help with the reading and to expand an expressive, personal response. Reading assignments average 350 pages per week.