Proust Confirmed by Neurosurgery

PMLA ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Total Recall ◽  
Montreal Neurological Institute ◽  
Involuntary Memory ◽  
The Mind

Marcel Proust stated clearly and repeatedly in his vast A la recherche du temps perdu his determining theory of involuntary memory. Proust's entire work was based upon experiences of total recall from a store of memories unconsciously preserved in the mind. In a paper delivered in 1957 by Dr. Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute are to be found physiological bases for Proust's esthetic experiences. Wilder reported that forgotten experiences were revealed to patients in great detail when electrodes were applied to various parts of their brains. Penfield thus supports Proust's view of a stream of memories (or, as Penfield calls it, a continuous filmstrip) preserving an individual's total experiential responses from childhood onward. The juxtaposition of Proust's statements with those of the neurosurgeon about the nature of this stream of unconscious memories, their relation to conscious memory, and the conditions under which they are recalled throws light upon the validity of Proust's technique.

The Meaning of Eliot's Rose-Garden

PMLA ◽  
1954 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
Robert D. Wagner ◽  
Sarah Lawrence College
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Julian Of Norwich ◽  
Human Power ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Modern Self ◽  
Great Discovery ◽  
The Mind

The imagination is the great discovery of modern self-consciousness. We have come to suppose that supreme moments of vision—whether these be the “shewings” of Dame Julian of Norwich or the “résurrections de la mémoire” of Marcel Proust—are the fruit merely of a human power to transform the ordinary appearances of daily life into transparent images on which the mind can rest. It could follow that all spiritual clarifications of reality, like great works of art, reveal no more than successful conjunctions of matter and consciousness.

“Déjà Vu” or Memory-Science between Gérard de Nerval and Marcel Proust

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelyne Ender
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
Mental Event ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Gerard De Nerval ◽  
Deja Vu ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Déjà Vu ◽  
The Mind

ArgumentCultivated by a number of writers and studied by psychologists, the phenomenon of déjà vu is an invention of the nineteenth century and is part of a broader exploration of how the mind experiences memory and time. Thus this typically benign mental aberration provides an entry-point into the mechanisms that preside over the regulation of the flow of consciousness. The theories of the mind developed recently by neuroscientists help us understand, meanwhile, why investigations into this mental “event” necessarily invoke concepts of representation and narrative. In fact, our increasingly sophisticated models for processes of memory and perception depend on literary representations. This article relies on the paramnesiac writings of Gérard de Nerval, seen through the lens of Proust's analysis, to argue that a consideration of the aesthetic and representational features of déjà-vu can bring us closer to solving the epistemological challenges we face in studying this phenomenon.For Gregory T. Polletta

The Ideal Real: A Frustrated Impulse in Samuel Beckett's Writing

2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Chris Ackerley
Keyword(s):  
The Sun ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
Involuntary Memory ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Ideal

Samuel Beckett's attraction to mysticism is most obvious in his interest in negative theology and the ; but it first presented itself in aesthetic rather than religious terms, through Proust's concept of the “ideal real,” as reflected in involuntary memory. For a time Beckett saw this as a viable aesthetic; that conviction was short-lived, but the “ideal real” left lasting traces on his work, though subject to increasing irony and the sense of the mind “devising.” In Beckett's most deliberate account of the transcendental experience, Arsene's moment in the sun in , the reality of the event is not in doubt but any validation of its meaning is emphatically withheld.

The Philosophy Class

2020 ◽  
Vol 111 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-439
Author(s):  
Michael Wood
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Involuntary Memory

Abstract Even as a schoolboy Marcel Proust specialized in thoughts of loss and doubt, and in À la recherche du temps perdu, he puts these thoughts to a very particular kind of philosophical work: the cultivation of epistemological (and other) errors that are certainly errors but are in some sense not entirely wrong. A noise is misinterpreted, attributed to an incorrect source, but Proust’s narrator, while scrupulously revising the perception, allows his first take a sort of magical afterlife. This effect is subtly developed in the last volume of the novel, where the narrator completes the experiences of involuntary memory that ground his whole theory of regained time—and also has experiences that contradict the theory, that show time to be ever-elapsing, impossible to regain. He doesn’t endorse the contradiction, and he doesn’t give up his theory. But he doesn’t erase the contradiction either.

scholarly journals The geometry of artistic space in the works by Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 165-169
Author(s):  
Alexander N. Taganov
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Main Role ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Involuntary Memory ◽  
Structural Organisation ◽  
Principle Of Relativity ◽  
Special Geometry ◽  
French Writer ◽  
Temporal Moments

The article considers the peculiarities of the artistic system in the works by the French writer of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, VLGE Marcel Proust. The foundations of his aesthetic views, which are manifested primarily at the level of the structural organisation in the novel cycle “In Search of Lost Timeˮ are studied. The specificity of the narrative, where the main role is played by involuntary memory, allows us to speak about the special geometry of the artistic space in this work. It happens due to Proust's rejection of “plane psychologyˮ in favour of “psychology in time”. It is shown how on such a basis, thanks to the mnemonic mechanism, a complex connection of spontaneously arising spatial fragments with the temporal moments of existence arises and the chronotopic structure of the novel, built on the principle of relativity, is constructed where time becomes, in fact, the fourth dimension of space.

Times in the Mind: Modernism in the 1920s

2018 ◽  
pp. 73-123
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Social World ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Counter Example ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Modernist Fiction

Confirmed at the same time as arrangements for the first Armistice Day were announced, Albert Einstein’s theories indicate that the 1920s were marked not only by stringent temporalities, but also by reactions against them and by alternative ways of conceptualising time. In the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust and others, this often took the form of a retreat from the social world into inner consciousness – into the minds of characters whose memories facilitated narrative structures evading everyday chronology in favour of freely following thoughts from the present into the past. Priorities involved can be compared with the work of recent and contemporary thinkers, including Henri Bergson as well as Einstein. Wyndham Lewis can be seen as an interesting if unreliable commentator on processes and possible influences involved, also providing an instructive counter-example in his own fiction. Modernist fiction itself, however, is far from comprehensively anachronic, but instead includes a strong element of conventional chronology as part of the complex interplay of contemporary temporalities its imagination seeks to contain.

scholarly journals Francis Bacon: “pintar sensações” (Francis Bacon: “to paint sensations”)

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Sonia Borges
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Involuntary Memory ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
Lost Time

O texto aborda, pela via da psicanálise, o que consideramos como o “método” de Francis Bacon: “pintar sensações”. Para isto, tomo, como referências principais, a Carta 52 (1896), da correspondência de Freud com Fliess, e Em busca do tempo perdido, romance de Marcel Proust ([1922] 1995), observando a possibilidade de considerar o que Proust nomeia como “memória involuntária” e o seu papel no processo criativo como uma ilustração esclarecedora do que Freud nos traz na Carta sobre a estratificação e o funcionamento do psiquismo. Estas ideias nos parecem bastante profícuas para a apreensão dos processos de subjetivação próprios à atividade artística, oferecendo, portanto, subsídios para pensar o processo criativo em Francis Bacon.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Sensação. Memória. Criação artística. ABSTRACT This text covers, by psychoanalysis way, what we consider the “method” of Francis Bacon: “to paint sensations”. For that, we take as main references, the Letter 52 (1896), from Freud to Fliess correspondence, and In search of the lost time, a romance of Marcel Proust ([1922] 1995), observing the possibility to consider what Proust names as “involuntary memory” and its role at the creative process as an enlightening illustration of what Freud brings us, at the mentioned Letter about the memory in the stratification and the psychic operation. These ideas seem to us fruitful for an apprehension of the subjective processes proper to artistic activity, offering, then, subside to think the creative process at Francis Bacon.KEYWORDS: Memory. Sensation. Creativity process.

How Homo economicus lost her mind and how we can revive her

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter DeScioli
Keyword(s):  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Homo Economicus ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
Target Article ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior

AbstractThe target article by Boyer & Petersen (B&P) contributes a vital message: that people have folk economic theories that shape their thoughts and behavior in the marketplace. This message is all the more important because, in the history of economic thought, Homo economicus was increasingly stripped of mental capacities. Intuitive theories can help restore the mind of Homo economicus.

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