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?

→ Listen 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
• Bohemianism
  
  9 Oct, 2003 700 Arts
• The Prelude
  
  22 Nov, 2007 820 English and Old English literatures
• Memory
  
  29 May, 2003 150 Psychology
• The Novel
  
  11 Nov, 1999 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Literary Modernism
  
  26 Apr, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures
• Tolstoy
  
  25 Apr, 2002 890 Other literatures
• Jorge Luis Borges
  
  4 Jan, 2007 860 Spanish, Portuguese, Galician literatures
• Surrealism
  
  15 Nov, 2001 700 Arts
• Originality
  
  20 Mar, 2003 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p00548wx

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

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

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, Marcel Proust's novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu or In Search of Lost Time has been called the definitive modern novel.