SOURCE: Stewart, Susan. “Proust's Turn from Nostalgia.” Raritan 19, no. 2 (fall 1999): 77-94.

In the following essay, Stewart argues against the notion that Proust's masterwork is a memoir rooted in nostalgia.

You can return to a book, but you cannot return to yourself. I had remembered Proust's In Search of Lost Time as a memoir driven by a nostalgic yearning for the past. Yet when I went back to it after a period of twenty years, Proust's research, in fact, turned out not to be about nostalgia at all. Rather, he frames a critique of such willful yearning and poses a certain form of aesthetic practice as counter to it. Proust's many-volumed book bears an analogue to memory, but not to experience; it opens on a world already shaped by desire, but in its manifold of sensual particulars it reveals far more than the reader would expect it to reveal...