Publications / Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives
Edited by Katherine Elkins. Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press, 2022.
Bibliographic record
- Editor
- Katherine Elkins
- Title
- Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives
- Series
- Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Year
- 2022
- Print ISBN
- 9780190921576
- Online ISBN
- 9780190921613
- DOI
- 10.1093/oso/9780190921576.001.0001
- Elkins’s contributions
- Introduction and “Proust’s Consciousness”
- Last updated
- 5 September 2026
About the book
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. Eight essays by philosophers and literary scholars treat In Search of Lost Time as a sustained investigation into how experience becomes knowledge.
Contributors Joshua Landy, Elisabeth Ladenson, Christie McDonald, Patrick Bray, Richard Moran, Robert Pippin, Dora Zhang, and Katherine Elkins examine fiction, biography, temporality, music, love, jealousy, weather, and consciousness.
In “Proust’s Consciousness,” Elkins argues that involuntary memory is only one part of Proust’s philosophical project. Many of the novel’s most important experiences are present-tense impressions that open onto perception, consciousness, and the difficulty of forming a philosophical position.
Reviews & Reception
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives has been reviewed in two major philosophy venues, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, where it was treated as a significant contribution to the contemporary philosophical study of Proust.
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Writing in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, philosopher Tom Stern describes the volume’s contributors as a “varied and expert group of writers” and emphasizes the collection’s engagement with central philosophical questions raised by In Search of Lost Time. He singles out chapters by Joshua Landy, Robert Pippin, and Katherine Elkins as directly confronting those questions.
Stern gives particular attention to Elkins’s chapter, “Proust’s Consciousness,” which he reads in relation to contemporary philosophy of mind, including qualia and the problem of consciousness. He also discusses Elkins’s introduction as part of the volume’s sustained engagement with the methodological difficulty of identifying philosophical commitments in Proust’s novel.
Stern concludes that “philosophically minded readers of Proust will surely find themselves drawn in somewhere along the way.”
Read the full review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews →
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
In a review essay in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, philosopher Bence Nanay considers Elkins’s volume alongside Joshua Landy’s The World According to Proust and Anna Elsner and Thomas Stern’s The Proustian Mind, positioning all three as major recent contributions to philosophical work on Proust.
Nanay presents Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives as occupying a distinctive middle ground between Landy’s more accessible philosophical introduction and the large-scale scholarly treatment of The Proustian Mind. He argues that, taken together, the three books should give “a serious push” to the philosophical analysis of Proust.
Nanay also highlights a central question in philosophy and literature: not simply what philosophical ideas a literary work contains, but how literary form itself can perform philosophical work. His discussion gives particular attention to Joshua Landy’s chapter on why Proust chose the novel, rather than the philosophical treatise, as the form for his ideas.
Read the full review in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism →
Continuing scholarly engagement
Tom Stern also engages the volume extensively in “Proustian Grief” (European Journal of Philosophy 33.2, 2025), citing both the collection and individual chapters in his philosophical account of grief in Proust.
Together, these reviews and later engagement position the volume as part of a renewed philosophical conversation about Proust, spanning philosophy of literature, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and the relationship between literary form and philosophical argument.
How to cite
Chicago
Elkins, Katherine, ed. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190921576.001.0001.
MLA
Elkins, Katherine, editor. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford UP, 2022.
APA
Elkins, K. (Ed.). (2022). Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190921576.001.0001
BibTeX
@book{elkins2022proust,
editor = {Elkins, Katherine},
title = {Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives},
series = {Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature},
publisher = {Oxford University Press},
year = {2022},
isbn = {9780190921576},
doi = {10.1093/oso/9780190921576.001.0001}
}