Next month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of "Swann's Way," the first volume of Marcel Proust's six-volume masterpiece "In Search of Lost Time." The novel is about a man compelled by a sudden surge of memory to revisit his past and, in the process, to draw meaning out of his seemingly uneventful life. Its unfolding is prompted, famously, by the narrator's dunking of a madeleine in a cup of herbal tea.

Untold universities have planned at least one reading or roundtable dedicated to Proust....