What Proust Said: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk

What Proust Said: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk

Author: Michael Lucey

Michael Lucey offers a linguistic ... anthropological analysis of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
 
What happens when we talk? This deceptively simple question is central to Marcel Proust’s monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. Both Proust’s narrator and the novel that houses him devote considerable energy to investigating not just what people are saying or doing when they talk, but also what happens socioculturally through their use of language. Proust, in other words, is interested in what linguistic anthropologists call language-in-use.