Big Fat Books Symposium

In Swann’s Way, the first of seven volumes in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the taste of a madeleine soaked in tea unleashes a flood of memories of the “flowers, houses, and people” in the small town of Combray during the narrator’s childhood. The story then shifts further back in time to the era of the narrator’s birth to focus on Charles Swann, a friend of the narrator’s family whose obsessive love affair with Odette de Crécy anticipates the themes that Proust will go on to explore in the larger novel: the distortions of jealousy, the vulgarity of high society, the great powers of love and art, and what it means to lead an authentic life . Please join BU faculty, students and friends for a day of lively conversation on one of the biggest, fattest, and funniest books of all time. We are also delighted to welcome Professor Jocelyne Kolb, whose keynote lecture draws from her forthcoming book about her father, Professor Philip Kolb, and his epic six-decade project to collect and annotate Proust’s vast correspondence.