Abstract

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. Bowieargues not just that the moral language of Proust is sufficiently strange and provocative to repay 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 an entirely new light upon the much discussed themes of memory and desire in the novel.