Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-1927) is celebrated as a modernist masterpiece but reading it poses very considerable challenges — not least in terms of length and style. Adam Watt will provide an overview of Proust’s novel and suggest that, a century after Proust’s death in 1922, we might better rise to the challenges of In Search of Lost Time by thinking about it through the prism of two related notions: perspective and plurality. As he will show, Proust’s novel is a monumental first-person narrative yet it is far from monolithic.
Adam Watt is Professor of French & Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. His publications on Proust have appeared in English, French, German, Chinese, Danish and Persian and include The Cambridge Introduction to Proust (2011), a critical biography of the author (2013) and, as editor, Marcel Proust in Context (2013). He is the editor of The Cambridge History of the Novel in French (2021) and co-editor, with Brian Nelson (Monash) of the forthcoming Oxford World Classics translation of A la recherche du temps perdu.
Aslam Lecture
Fees:
Members: Free, Online or Victoria Hall
Non-Members: £5, Online or Victoria Hall
Please book by 1pm on the day of the event