What’s So Great About Proust?

Synopsis: Published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, in so far as it deals explicitly with a disappearing world in ways often felt to be incorrigibly nostalgic, could be seen as a monumental relic anchored in a historical moment that is no longer of any great concern to us. So why has it proved to be arguably the most ‘popular’ of the classics of early high modernism and what is it about the novel that appeals to such a variety of twenty-first century readers?

This is an audio recording of a discussion held at the Royal Society of Literature, London on 9 December 2010 in which novelist and critic Margaret Drabble, psychotherapist Jane Haynes, and poet and translator Ian Patterson, discuss their love of Proust with Christopher Prendergast, who recently oversaw the major new translation of À la recherche for Penguin.
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Year of release: 2010
Year of production: 2010
Subjects: French studies; Literature
Keywords: literature - French; Proust, Marcel; literature - 20th century

Name: Royal Society of Literature
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Notes: Public lectures and discussions are regularly held at the Royal Society of Literature in London and audio recordings of these are made by the British Library’s National Sound Archive. The RSL is in the process of uploading all their recordings from the past decade to their website for streaming, and some are available for download.

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