Senior Seminar
Proust, Woolf and the Modern Novel
“Well – what remains to be written after that?” wondered Virginia Woolf in a 1922 letter about Marcel Proust’s monumental seven-volume work, In Search of Lost Time. Chronicling everything from the strangeness of kissing to the casual cruelties of snobbery, Proust’s novel conducts a vast and searching inquiry into the nooks and crannies of human experience. At the same time, it’s an unflinching account of a particular era, as the glittering decadence of belle époque Paris gave way to the horrors to the First World War, and rapidly changing modern life came to include new inventions like the telephone, the automobile, and the cinema.
An astute and admiring reader of Proust, Woolf carried out her own searches in her fiction, examining “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day,” the “incessant shower of innumerable atoms…as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday.” At the same time that she probed the depths of the human psyche, Woolf was also deeply engaged with the world around her – that of early 20th century Britain – depicting intersecting lives in London, the effects of war and colonialism, and newly prominent issues of gender and sexuality.
Today Proust and Woolf are considered two of the most brilliant and inventive writers of the 20th century, challenging and redefining the form of the novel and continuing to speak to us a century later. In this seminar we will read a large selection of their works, looking at their aesthetic innovations as well as the philosophical and historical questions they raise. Themes will include: the experience of time, the workings of memory and perception, what it means to be a self, the nature of knowledge, the operations of social power, and the logic of love.
Texts
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove; The Guermantes Way (selections); Sodom and Gomorrah (selections), Time Regained. We will be reading the Modern Classics Library edition of the Scott Moncrieff translation.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts
Supplementary critical readings (e.g. Freud, Bergson, Sedgwick) will be distributed as PDFs. Reading knowledge of French is helpful, but not necessary.