Catherine Colomb's Vision of Time: In Dialogue with Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf

In this thesis, we want to study time as an aesthetic element and a philosophical question by reading Catherine Colomb’s novels in dialogue with the writings of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, as the title suggests. This study incidentally aims, on the one hand, to point out the significance of Colomb’s œuvre in 20th century literature next to Proust’s and Woolf’s fiction; on the other hand, to add to our knowledge of the questions of time, memory, and perception in the novelistic prose. The thesis shows that Catherine Colomb’s work is of impressive complexity, not only in its curving style, ephemeral and sequence-defying narrative, but also in its literary engagement with the science and philosophy that shaped modernity and proposed new ways of thinking time, knowledge, and the human experience.