The Timelessness of Proust

Marcel Prousts la recherche du temps perduIn Search of Lost Timeis one of the most important and influential novels of the modern era. In recent decades, Proust has enjoyed a new surge of critical attention, as well as a sustained growth in readershipwell beyond that of other prose masters of twentieth century modernism such as Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett. The MLA Bibliography presently lists over 3,000 citations to scholarly works devoted to Prousts novel, and if one Googles Proust, the number of hits exceeds 2,000,000. The temporal nature of human existence and consciousness is one of the many themes explored in In Search of Lost Time, and it is this dimension of Prousts work that unifies this collection of essays that grew from a roundtable discussion entitled The Timelessness of Proust conducted at the 31st annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society. The collection includes the following essays: In Search of Lost Time: Biographies of Consciousness, Charles R. Embry Proust, Transcendence, and Metaxic Existence, Glenn Hughes The Normative Flow of Consciousness and the Self: A Philosophical Meditation on Prousts In Search of Lost Time, Thomas J. McPartland; Imprisonment and Freedom: Resisting and Embracing the Tension of Existence in Marcel Prousts In Search of Lost Time, Paulette Kidder; Prousts Luminous Memory and LHomme ternel: The Quest for Limitless Meaning, Michael Henry Unsought Revelations of Eternal Reality in Eliots Four Quartets and Prousts In Search of Lost Time, Glenn Hughes Persons who are interested not only in the philosophical importance of literary masterworks and in how the philosophical thought of Eric Voegelin may illuminate them, but also in letting Proust serve as a guide in the exploration and understanding of their own lives, will find these essays to be of lasting interest and value.