French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Simon, Proust or Reality Regained: The Sensible and its Expression in In Search of Lost Time
Novel and Narrative Prose
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Anne Simon, Proust or Reality Regained: The Sensible and its Expression in In Search of Lost Time
Paris: Honoré Champion, "Proustian Research" series, 2011.
EAN 9782745319975.
248 p.
55 EUR
Publisher's Description:
Analyzing the reconfigurations of reality
and of the sensible in In Search of Lost Time, Proust or Reality Regained shows how the notions of "furrow", "network", or the relation between the self and the world substitute for the more classical notions of matter, raw fact, or object. In this new approach to reality, which foreshadows that of the philosopher Merleau-Ponty a few decades later, depth plays a major role: it characterizes the whole of reality, from time to the psyche, from sensible spectacles to the silent life of the body. At the heart of the artist's activity, compared to a "diver", it also defines Proust's style, based on the technique of superimposition, which renews the problem of literary reference by revealing the intertwining of language, fantasy, and sensation in accessing "reality as we have felt it".
An alumna of the École normale supérieure, Anne Simon is a research fellow at the CNRS. Combining literary studies and the humanities, she studies the body, the living, and animality in 20th-21st-century narrative prose.
The "Proustian Research" series is edited by Annick Bouillaguet
Published in Honoré Champions Proustian Research series, this monograph examines how Marcel Proust reimagines the material world and sensory experience in In Search of Lost Time. By moving away from classical definitions of objects and raw facts, the author highlights a modern approach to reality that anticipates the phenomenological inquiries of later twentieth-century philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The study pays close attention to the stylistic techniques that allow the narrator to capture the silent life of the body, interior psychological depths, and the passage of time through literary expression.
This book will be of particular value to scholars and students of twentieth-century French literature, narrative prose, and the intersections between literary studies and philosophy. By investigating how fantasy, language, and sensation intertwine in Prousts masterpiece, the volume offers fresh tools for understanding modernist representation and aesthetic depth. It addresses central questions regarding how literature accesses remembered experience and renders the sensible world tangible, making it an essential resource for readers engaged in deep critical approaches to Proustian poetics.