Marcel Proust and His French Critics

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...

Rorty and His Critics

Marcel Proust and Paul Sollier: the involuntary memory connection

In December 1905, eight years before he published the first volume of“In Search of LostTime”,Marcel Proust entered a sanatorium to follow a six-week treatment for “neurasthenia” under the care of Dr Paul Sollier who, along with Babinski, was considered the cleverest pupil of Charcot. Following Charcot’s wish, Sollier had studied memory in depth,and he used this knowledge to provoke emotional su...

Consciousness, art, and the brain: lessons from Marcel Proust.

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust's theory of conscious experience and sh...

Daniel Dohrn Lewis and his Critics on