The Cosmic Library

7.2 In Search of Lost Time: Enchanted Self-Discovery

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time follows the development of a self. The narrator grows up in Combray, in the seaside town of Balbec, in Paris, and resolves to become a writer. But that narrative also encompasses so much else, from historical crises to philosophical riffs to self-doubts. Proust scholar Joshua Landy points out that Proust is “absolutely laying traps for the reader. He's tempting the reader into thinking it's a memoir at times. And he's tempting the reader to think that it's a treatise, that all the things that this narrator says can be taken at face value—you can take them to the bank, it's the gospel truth, this is what Proust believes. In fact, that's not the case.”As Hannah Freed-Thall, a scholar of Proust at NYU, says: “I try to approach this text with a certain humility . . . I will never make an argument that is true for the entirety of this novel. It’s just too self-contradictory.” In this episode, we talk about how multitudinous richness buzzes throughout the novel’s story of self-discovery. Along the way, you'll hear a reading from Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time.Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust; and Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

7.1 In Search of Lost Time: Imaginary Music

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time lifts off on page after page, but it always returns to earth, back to the narrator’s memories and thoughts and experiences. Somehow, this seven-volume French novel from the early twentieth century covers a vast range of possibility and surprise while still concerned completely with the thoughts and feelings of a single person—the narrator, whom we might or might not call Marcel, and who famously lights up when the taste of a madeleine reveals a world of memory.In this season of The Cosmic Library, we talk about how À la recherche du temps perdu soars beyond—and stays within—its limits. Artistic discovery pulses through this novel, even though it’s full of encounters with society’s cliches, with bad habits, with jealous obsession, and with wasted time, all of which are experienced by the narrator as he grows up.In this miniseries, we’ll hear passages from each volume of In Search of Lost Time, so you can consider these five episodes to be an unusual adaptation of Proust’s novel. Along the way, we’ll talk about the novel's notions of music, of self-discovery, of bad habits, and more. In this introduction, we hear from the first volume, Swann’s Way, and especially get into the subject of music, which activates the narrator’s thinking and that of the narrator’s family friend Charles Swann. Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker, explains here that the novel is "very observant about how music comes into our life and how it can obsess us.” Prompted by Proust’s musical sensibility, this season will also continually rework The Cosmic Library’s own theme song, turning to music in a way that might—the hope is—advance the show to new intensities.Intense experiences of art can, in Proust’s novel, make things happen. The Proust scholar Joshua Landy says that the novel's music “provides us a formal model for thinking about the shape of our own life.” And a novel where lives take musical shape can take some surprising turns. Hannah Freed-Thall, Proust scholar at NYU, says that “it feels like a text that is wild and not 100% in control of itself, and that’s appealing to me.” In Search of Lost Time can explore selfhood, then, and find that the self is a sprawling, mutable thing. As the novelist Rick Moody tells us, “Especially as you get towards volume seven, there’s not a stable Marcel.”Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust; and Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Season 7 Trailer: In Search of Lost Time

The new season of The Cosmic Library is on the way, and this time we’re talking about—and listening to—Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Conversations go everywhere: we’re thinking about the nature of time, music, and the self, and we’re figuring out how focusing on self might take us way beyond ourselves.Each episode will include a reading from In Search of Lost Time. This miniseries, then, works as an unconventional audiobook adaptation of Proust’s novel—full of digressions, conversations about the book, commentary, and riffs, but always looping back into readings from the novel itself.Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; and Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust.The first episode will be out on February 18, and new episodes will come out weekly into March. Find it at Lit Hub or wherever you go for podcasts!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

6.5 Karamazov Season: Where Parallels Converge

By now, it's clear that The Brothers Karamazov sits comfortably on the shelf of books of infinity, books that can never be completed. It is, for one thing, only the first part of a plan Dostoevsky had for much more. But this novel also emphasizes incompleteness, drives toward potential rather than anything that might be perfectly established on the page. In episode four, we talked about incompleteness theorems, finding a mathematical dimension to some of our literary notions. And in The Brothers Karamazov, no system of thought is complete on its own. Characters also change each other continually, as if in a sort of infinite chain reaction. A sense of intensified possibility pervades, and the brothers move toward that sense especially in their connection to childhood. Throughout The Brothers Karamazov—and throughout this season—there are prompts to reflect on earlier states of potential, to recall what came before. Garth Risk Hallberg in this episode describes how the novel prompts reflection on itself, gets the reader to look back on what’s been read or experienced: Dostoevsky, Hallberg says, “likes to inset these little mirrors into the text that reflect back on it and force you to reconsider what you’re reading.” In this sense, the ending of the book—and this miniseries—can send you back to all kinds of beginnings, including this season’s first episode, where you can hear the Brothers Karamazov radio play that started things. Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library: Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel   Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

6.4 Karamazov Season: Math Dreams

In this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ve heard us discuss how Fyodor Dostoevsky's Karamazov brothers converge, even as they're on seemingly distinct tracks. And the novel directs attention to convergences in surprising ways: at one point, for example, Ivan Karamazov alludes to non-Euclidean geometry in which parallel lines meet—in which otherwise separate things join.  It doesn't just happen mathematically, or philosophically: dreams, too, can bring the novel’s characters toward convergence. Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky scholar, says here: “Dreams that characters have are as important to them, in the long run, and as illuminating to them in the long run, as any philosophical ideas that they might embrace.” Math and dreams both offer means by which alternative ways of thinking can be accessed, and by which separations might get resolved or reconsidered. Mathematician and science journalist Paulina Rowińska says in this episode, “Math is much richer than what we learn in school. And the key point, that’s also relevant to Dostoevsky, is that math is also relative, as with Euclidean/non-Euclidean.” Different geometries, different philosophies, and different states of consciousness all offer ways for characters to think differently, and change, and collide in The Brothers Karamazov. No single system seems victorious here, but the process that moves through system after system—or character after character—works with irresistibly vital, dramatic force. Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library: Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel   Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.