Books

Books

Two sustained inquiries into how narrative gives form to consciousness, memory, emotion, and interpretation—from Proust’s philosophy of experience to a rigorous computational method for tracing stories across texts.

Two sustained inquiries

Major Books

Cover of Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives

Oxford University Press, 2022

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives

Edited by Katherine Elkins, who also wrote the introduction and contributed the chapter “Proust’s Consciousness.”

The volume brings Proust into philosophy not simply as a novelist of memory, but as a thinker of consciousness, perception, time, selfhood, ethics, and aesthetic experience. It gathers philosophers and literary scholars to treat In Search of Lost Time as a sustained investigation into how experience becomes knowledge.

In “Proust’s Consciousness,” Elkins argues that involuntary memory is only one part of Proust’s philosophical project, foregrounding perception, present-tense experience, and consciousness.

Oxford University Press →NDPR review →Scholarly reception →

Related work on Proust, memory & mind

  • “Proust’s Consciousness”Perception, present-tense experience, and the philosophy of consciousness.
  • “Proust’s Novel Time”Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, 2023. Narrative form, memory, temporality, and lived experience.
  • “Proust’s Family at Home”H-France Salon 13.13, 2021. Family, domesticity, memory, and self-formation.
  • “Middling Memories and Dreams of Oblivion”Discourse 24.3, 2002. Non-archival memory in Baudelaire and Proust.

Philosophy of Mind, Literature & Information →

Cover of The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative

Cambridge University Press, 2022

The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative

A Cambridge Element in Digital Literary Studies by Katherine Elkins.

The Shapes of Stories develops the first rigorous methodology for narrative sentiment analysis. It establishes a reproducible framework for selecting, comparing, validating, and interpreting sentiment models across full-length narrative texts while retaining the interpretive questions central to literary study.

Building on instruments developed by Elkins and Jon Chun, the method tests robustness across sentiment systems and shows how model selection, smoothing, scale, and segmentation shape the story curve a researcher sees. It connects computational modeling with close and middle reading, translation and transmission, and the movement of stories across cultural contexts.

Its account of narrative as emotional and cognitive form continues in current work on persuasion, memory, interpretation, human judgment, and model behavior.

Publication page →Cambridge →Scholarly reception →

Related work on narrative, computation & translation

  • “Can Sentiment Analysis Reveal Structure in a ‘Plotless’ Novel?”2019. Introduced middle reading and joined emotional arcs to close reading.
  • SentimentArcsDeveloped by Jon Chun, a novel ensemble method for comparing narrative sentiment trajectories across texts.
  • “eXplainable AI with GPT-4 for Story Analysis and Generation”2023. Sentence-level trajectories, explanation, and comparative story analysis.
  • “In Search of a Translator”2024. Computational comparison of Proust across literary translations.
  • MultiSentimentArcs2024. Cross-modal comparison of visual and dialogue arcs.

Explore the methodology in Research →
Narrative, Translation & Cultural Transmission →

Interpretation across forms

A Continuing Inquiry

Across these works, questions about consciousness, memory, narrative, interpretation, translation, and mediation increasingly converge with computational methods and artificial intelligence. The AI research extends these longstanding inquiries into how language, models, and technologies shape human judgment and knowledge. Explore the research program →

Scholarship for broader audiences

Public Humanities & Lecture Series

Cover of The Modern Scholar: Giants of French Literature

Recorded Books / The Modern Scholar

Giants of French Literature

A lecture series on Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Camus and the development of French literary culture.

Listen on Audible →
Cover of The Modern Scholar: The Modern Novel

Recorded Books / The Modern Scholar

The Modern Novel

A lecture series on Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Woolf, tracing modern fiction’s experiments with mind, time, and form.

Listen on Audible →

Recorded Books / The Modern Scholar, 2009

Odyssey of the West, Part Six: Towards the Modern

Lectures on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, drawing together nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art and culture.

For talks, workshops, and current public programs, see Speaking →

Editorial work

Selected Edited Work

Guest editor · Humanities, 2024–2025

“Depiction of Good and Evil in Fairytales”

A special issue connected to the wider research on fairytale variants, moral difference, emotional architecture, and cultural transmission.

View the special issue →