[Linganth] What Proust Heard -- author interview with Michael Lucey

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Michael Lucey answers my questions about his book, What
Proust Heard.

https://campanthropology.org

See how a grandmaster of literary criticism translates linguistic
anthropological tools into French novels.

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: What happens when we talk? This deceptively simple question is
central to Marcel Proust’s monumental novel *In Search of Lost Time*. Both
Proust’s narrator and the novel that houses him devote considerable energy
to investigating not just what people are *saying *or *doing *when they
talk, but also what happens socioculturally through their use of language.
Proust, in other words, is interested in what linguistic anthropologists
call language-in-use.

Michael Lucey elucidates Proust’s approach to language-in-use in a number
of ways: principally in relation to linguistic anthropology, but also in
relation to speech act theory, and to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. The book
also includes an interlude after each of its chapters that contextualizes
Proust’s social-scientific practice of novel writing in relation to that of
a number of other novelists, earlier and later, and from several different
traditions, including Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf,
Nathalie Sarraute, and Rachel Cusk. Lucey is thus able to show how, in the
hands of quite different novelists, various aspects of the novel form
become instruments of linguistic anthropological analysis. The result
introduces a different way of understanding language to literary and
cultural critics and explores the consequences of this new understanding
for the practice of literary criticism more generally.
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