Proust

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work Marcel Proust whose novel A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, or In Search of Lost Time, has been called the definitive modern novel. His stylistic innovation, sensory exploration and fascination with memory were to influence a whole body of thinkers, from the German intellectuals of the 1930s to the Bloomsbury set, chief among them Virginia Woolf, and innumerable critics and novelists since. But how did he succeed in creating a 3000 page novel with such an artistic coherence? To what extent did John Ruskin influence Proust? Is his fascination with memory and recall simply a nostalgia for the past? And what impact did he have on the 20th century novel?

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Jacqueline Rose 3 episodes
  Professor of English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London
• Malcolm Bowie 5 episodes
  Master of Christ's College, Cambridge
• Dr Robert Fraser No other episodes
  Senior Research Fellow in the Literature Department at the Open University

Related episodes

• Bergson and Time
  
  9 May, 2019 110 Metaphysics
• The Prelude
  
  22 Nov, 2007 820 English and Old English literatures
• John Ruskin
  
  31 Mar, 2005 700 Arts
• Germaine de Stael
  
  16 Nov, 2017 840 French and related literatures
• Four Quartets
  
  22 Dec, 2016 820 English and Old English literatures
• Auden
  
  19 Dec, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures
• Walter Benjamin
  
  10 Feb, 2022 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• William Morris
  
  5 Jul, 2018 700 Arts
• Originality
  
  20 Mar, 2003 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Sartre
  
  7 Oct, 2004 840 French and related literatures
• Montaigne
  
  25 Apr, 2013 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Literary Modernism
  
  26 Apr, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures
• Jorge Luis Borges
  
  4 Jan, 2007 860 Spanish, Portuguese, Galician literatures
• Memory
  
  29 May, 2003 150 Psychology
• Samuel Beckett
  
  17 Jan, 2019 840 French and related literatures
• James Joyce’s Ulysses
  
  14 Jun, 2012 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Waste Land and Modernity
  
  26 Feb, 2009 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Science’s Revelations
  
  29 Oct, 1998 500 Science
• The Brain and Consciousness
  
  19 Nov, 1998 150 Psychology
• Edgar Allan Poe
  
  30 Nov, 2023 810 American literature in English

---

Programme ID: p00548wx

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548wx

Auto-category: 843.912 (French fiction–20th century)