Lazy Proust and Literary ‘Work’

Proust: the body and literary form

Florence Nightingale, William Farr and John Simon. All of these have received a good measure of historical attention, but the engineer Joseph Bazalgette, architect of London's main drainage system, and arguably originator of the blueprint for modem city sanitation, has been neglected by historians. This is a pity, because the conception of Bazalgette's grand plan for London's drainage, the tech...

Lazy Learners at work : the Lazy Learning

The Maladies of Marcel Proust. Doctors and Disease in His Life and Work

Perhaps the high points in the book are those examples of natural experiments wherein the temporal trends in a risk factor or an intervention strategy vary across subcategories and can be compared to cancer trends in the same subcategories. Particularly striking were the data presented by Hakama on cervical cancer: Since 1960 invasive cervical cancer has declined by a factor of two or more in t...

In Search of Lost Community: The Literary Image between “Proust” and “Baudelaire” in Walter Benjamin’s Modernization Lament

This essay takes up the encounter between philosophy and literature through a reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s remarks from “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” about Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire as an attempt “[t]owering above” other ventures into Lebensphilosophie to “lay hold of the ‘true’ experience, as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the...

Reading fiction and the psychoanalytic experience: Proust on reading and on reading Proust.

Reading can at times engage one emotionally and entail inner psychological experiences in ways akin to those in clinical psychoanalysis. In that light, after a general introduction regarding the import of reading, attention is turned to Proust, Freud's literary complement, as an exemplary instance to illustrate those similarities. Ideas of Proust on reading are followed by thoughts on reading P...