Inaugural Lectures (University of Oxford) S.
1 total work
How does it come about that a novel containing thousands of moral statements is seldom critically examined from a moral point of view? In his inaugural lecture, Professor Bowie presents Proust's narrator as a moral theorist obsessively concerned with the definition of virtue and vice. Bowie argues not just that the moral language of Proust is sufficiently strange and provocative to replay close study but that "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" has a distinctive moral architecture which deserves to be included among the wonders of the Proustian world. Bowie's account of Proustian virtue, especially as it appears in the culminating pages of "Le Temps Retrouve", casts a new light upon the much discussed themes of memory and desire in the novel.