July 15-19

Tutors: Michael Dink and Rebecca Goldner
In the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator finds himself revisiting and intensifying his relationships to characters we have already met. Among these are the Duchesse de Guermantes, Baron de Charlus, Charles Swann, and Albertine. In this volume, the French aristocracy, which had seemed to be something mysterious and mythic beyond his ken, becomes an object both of personal experience and of evaluative scrutiny. Characters who seemed removed from him now inhabit his everyday life, both because he has become neighbors with them and also because he is becoming a part of their social world. We enter this world with him, a world with its own rules about wit, art, hierarchy, and status. Running through the novel as an undercurrent is the Dreyfus affair, raising questions about loyalty, patriotism, and antisemitism.

Text: Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (ed. Christopher Prendergast). Penguin Classics, ISBN 9780143039228