What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk

Michael Lucey offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. 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,