La Recherche en question: l'aporie dans "À la recherche du temps perdu"

Abstract

The dissertation, titled La Recherche en question: l’aporie dans À la recherche du temps perdu, pertains to both Proustian studies and Ancient philosophy (epistemology). After a chapter on Antiquity which articulates a theoretical framework for the study as a whole, I provide a detailed reading of exemplary forms of aporia in Proust’s novel. If similarities between literature’s and philosophy’s treatment of concepts has become a rich academic field, literature (and Proust, in particular) always seems to be a mere “illustration,” a sensible representation of what is reflected upon by philosophers. In my dissertation, I developed an account of this relationship with a different viewpoint in order to access the structure of Proust’s literary epistemology. I compare modes of questioning rather than theses. In other terms, in Proust’s narrator’s “search for Truth,” I emphasize the search over the truth.