Commentators are in general agreement that Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and practice is too deterministic, but they have failed to provide a workable template for revisions. Here the French novelist Marcel Proust is proposed as a phenomenological corrective. There are strong family resemblances between his approach to social life and that of Bourdieu. In Remembrance of Things Past, however, Proust offers an understanding of action that is more sensitive to contingency, self-reflexivity, change, desire and the layering of the self. (...) Attention to this will pay dividends for those seeking to creatively reconstruct Bourdieu’s project. (shrink)

The final volume of Marcel Proust's novel _ la Recherche du Temps perdu (Recherche)_ presents a striking puzzle. In this volume, the narrator Marcel proposes a literary theory which is supposed to provide the theoretical basis for the whole book, such that the _Recherche_ can be considered a novel which contains its own theory. However, the _Recherche_ as a whole does not seem to comply with this literary theory. I suggest in this paper that this puzzle (...) can be solved by appreciating that Marcel's theory of literature, and his understanding of the way literature relates to his own life, is based on a Hegelian notion of teleology. (shrink)