Proust’s literary world consists of events as reflected and reconsidered by society

Evidence

When Marcel Proust, himself half Jewish and in emergencies ready to identify himself as a Jew, set out to search for “things past,” he actually wrote what one of his admiring critics has called an apologia pro vita sua. The life of this greatest writer of twentieth-century France was spent exclusively in society; all events appeared to him as they are reflected in society and reconsidered by the individual, so that reflections and reconsiderations constitute the specific reality and texture of Proust’s world. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 256

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Arendt’s concept of ‘society’ as a reflective medium — the social domination that converts citizens into objects of appearance.