ABSTRACT
In the case of the reminiscences, the feeling of intense joy is explicitly linked to one of evidence and certitude. The sense of ease and evidence represents a fundamental, though only momentary change in the narrator's sense of being in the world. His usual state is characterized by an ineliminable anxiety and a feeling of discordance with others and the world. Jean-Marc Quaranta adopts Robert Langbaum's criteria and demonstrates that the privileged moments in Proust's Recherche fulfil them all. He argues that epiphany is a workable interpretative device that embraces all the key aspects of the privileged moment previously observed in the scholarship but never conceptualized in a coherent manner. Some aspect of the world or of the self, distant either in time or in space, which would usually appear unfathomable to the narrator, suddenly presents itself in an immediate manner, such that the problem of its otherness vanishes.
