The 2024-25 David Eddings Lecture

Two of the most “encyclopedic” works of modernist literature—Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and James Joyce’s Ulysses— could hardly be more different in their chronology: one unfolding over many decades, the other confining the scope of its action to a single day. Starting from their brief overlap in Paris in the early 1920s, this lecture looks at how Joyce and Proust’s very different relationships to the place they lived—one a self-conscious exile, the other a longtime hometown resident—shaped all aspects of their novelistic vision. This lecture uses the Joyce-Proust binary as a way to understand various novelistic modes of language, style, character and time, in writers from Madame de Lafayette though Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, and Elsa Morante.  

Barry McCrea holds the Keough Family Chair at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches in the departments of English, romance languages, Irish and Irish studies. He is the co-director and founder of the International Network for the Comparative Humanities. He is the author of Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in 20th-century Ireland and Europe (2015), In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust (2011), and the novel The First Verse (2009).

Sponsored by the English department and the Division of Literature & Languages. Free and open to the public.