Science and Structure in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu

by Luckhurst, Nicola

• ISBN13: 9780198160021
• ISBN10: 019816002X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-04-06
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is a hybrid, a novel-essay, a capacious work of fiction containing a commonplace-book. It might, as Roland Barthes has suggested, be thought of as the product of profound and cherished indecision, Proust's indecision between two styles of writing, themoralistic and the fictive/novelistic/romanesque. Structure and Science is an exploration of this indecision. The shorter Proust, Proust the moraliste, is a prolific writer of maxims, from the laws of the passions to the aesthetic manifesto of the Temps retrouve to the [?rapacious] teeming/fertile/spawning/exuberant/luxuriant reflection(s) on sexuality, politics, society. Yet these maxims, whose grammarlays claim to timelessness, are bound up in narrative, the story of their evolution. And disintegration. Proust's moralizing exposes our affective relationship with law statements, with authority, and it is this question that engages A la recherche in an epistemological debate which crosses theboundaries between the two cultures, art and science. What might be called the epistemological alertness of Proust's text is explored at this interface between 'modernist' science and literature.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(5)
Maxims	6	(42)
The Proustian critique	6	(7)
Proust as moraliste	13	(4)
Writing La Bruyere and rewriting	17	(8)
Concluding our reading of maxims	25	(5)
Proust as scientist	30	(7)
Poincare's science and method	37	(11)
Correspondence Between Art and Science	48	(19)
Retroduction	67	(14)
Hypothesis	81	(29)
Tracing hypothesis---abundance	88	(7)
The hypothetical norm	95	(6)
`A propos des deux hypotheses essentiel'	101	(9)
Modelling	110	(49)
Modelling aesthetics	116	(2)
Swann's story	118	(11)
Scientific modelling	129	(5)
A correspondence course in modelling	134	(3)
Metaphor or model?	137	(1)
Sodome et Gomorrhe	138	(3)
Botany: the state of the field	141	(5)
Genesis of the model	146	(7)
The aesthetic model	153	(6)
Knowledge as Revolution and Revelation	159	(41)
Revelation and the archive: male homosexuality	163	(6)
Revelation and aporia: female homosexuality	169	(20)
Narratives of revelation	189	(11)
Theory-Laden Souffrance	200	(25)
Serendipity	225	(20)
Bibliography	245	(12)
Index	257