Swann's Way Marcel Proust

The "Combray" section of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way is an extended meditation on an idyllic past. The book begins, though, not with recollections of Combray, but with a description of the narrator's half-asleep state, a state of consciousness...

To read Proust carefully is like looking closely at your own pupil. Curiosity pushes you up to the mirror so close that eventually the tool of perception itself is ineffective. Indeed you can't see what's doing the seeing. Likewise, putting up a...

The classical love story, the timeless tale of pairs whose only destinies are to be together, is an abhorred notion to Proust in In Search of Lost Time. Love stories in this Roman-fleuve are not be all, end all events; rather, they are temporary...

The issue of class and its representations is consistently present in society, and pervades everyday life to a significant degree, especially when considering the social dynamics of the past century; as such, it is also very prominent in...

Proust famously claimed that, because of books’ interpretive nature, readers subconsciously mold the characters in the literature they consume. In turn, one can construct a portrait of the reader’s own personality, offering insight into her needs...