RUSN 337 The Novel as Philosophy: Recollecting Lost Time

This course will meet twice a week with CSLC 237, and for one additional 85 minute session per week to develop Russian students’ language skills. Students will have an opportunity to translate and discuss selections from Mamardashvili’s Lectures on Proust in the original Russian. Students completing the final paper in this course with a grade of C or higher can use this work to satisfy the Second Stage Writing requirement.

The associated CSLC 237 course description is as follows: Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is considered to be one of the greatest novels ever written. Two 20th century thinkers—an Eastern European philosopher Merab Mamardashvili and a French thinker Gilles Deleuze —argued that Proust’s novel is a philosophical machine: an artificial organ that allows one to gather and re-construct the self. This course puts to the test Deleuze’s and Mamardashvili’s interpretations of this novel by considering them in conjunction with significant portions of In Search of Lost Time.