The Cambridge Companion to Proust by Richard Bales (ed.)
Published 2001 · 229 pages · 57,250 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays
How hard is The Cambridge Companion to Proust to read?
The Cambridge Companion to Proust scores 70 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 78 out of 100
- Advanced literary criticism vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 75 out of 100
- Complex scholarly prose.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- High theory, phenomenology.
- Information density: 85 out of 100
- Dense academic analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Critical essays format.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Analyzes Proustian symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Scholarly distance.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- Academic conclusions.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Multi-essay collection.
How The Cambridge Companion to Proust is regarded
The Cambridge Companion to Proust holds a literary regard score of 56 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.