Date of Award
Spring 2025
Language
English
Embargo Period
4-30-2025
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College/School/Department
Department of English
Program
English
First Advisor
Helen Elam
Second Advisor
Kir Kuiken
Third Advisor
Ineke Murakami
Keywords
Proust, Memory, Perception, Social, Romance, Art
Subject Categories
French and Francophone Literature
Abstract
Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way is written with such detail that it overwhelms both the reader’s and the character’s sensory experience. Despite all the details, each character takes their senses of the world and strings them together as coherent images and stories. Proust shows that perceptions and memories are malleable, as individuals perceive objects in a way that brings entire stories or images to their conscious experience. The way that Proust’s characters take sensory objects and create images shows that each character can consciously interpret the world around them. Social images find themselves competing with the personally constructed images of an individual, both competing in an individual’s created world. Like the social aspects of mental images, the arrival of a love interest changes the way each character views the objects around them. Love shakes the world of Proust’s characters so violently that it changes the images they once had of the objects they love. Marcel and Swann shine through as the sole creators of their individual worlds, even with the competing forces of perception, society, and love that exert their influence on their internally constructed images. Marcel and Swann’s status as creators turns what could be seen as a cacophony of sensations and creations that are incomprehensibly numerous into a personally curated set of images, each telling the story that Marcel and Swann find most valuable.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Snowball, Ethan D., "Perception as Creation in Swann's Way" (2025). Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present). 168.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/etd/168
