0.0

credits

Average Course Rating

What is personal memory? This course offers both an in-depth journey through Proust’s Recherche and a way of tracing major scientific questions about the formation of memory in connection with autobiography and medical history. The process of human remembering -- with its counterpart, forgetting -- has emerged over the last thirty years as an extraordinarily rich field of investigation as well as of creative endeavors in the arts. Poised between literature and science, this course offers both an in-depth introduction to Proust’s ground breaking modern work on human time, A la recherche du temps perdu, and an investigation into a modern history of memory (a history that unfolds in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and has made a surprising return in our contemporary understanding of remembrance). That Proust’s petite madeleine should have turned, in recent years, into the magical token of autobiographical recollection and provided, at the same time, an immensely productive clinical and neuro-scientific model of how memory works serves as our point of departure. That human memory is an experience and not merely a biological function -- its existence depending on language -- will be our running thread. Proust’s book, filled with immensely learned and complex descriptions of mnemonic processes, serves as our case-study. Proust’s investigations into remembering reveal fascinating aspects of the 19th century advances into the psychology and nosography of memory. These will in turn prompt us to read his work in light of present controversies in scientific research, as for example on the construction of memory, on “body-memory,” the interface between cognition and emotion, and the mind/brain debate. As it prompts many questions on the relation between fiction and experience, this journey through major themes of Proust’s quest for memory will invite a broader reflection on the relation between literary and philosophical investigations. Requirements