PROUSTFEST, Part 1: Writer Lisa Cohen on “‘Medicine is Not an Exact Science’: Evidence, Grief, and Style in Proust.”

Proust’s interest in and irony about medicine is a well-documented aspect of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Cohen, the author of the highly acclaimed 2012 group biography All We Know: Three Lives, will explore some of the relationships among biographical research, medicine, and the workings of grief in Proust and in her own work. What does Proust tell us about the temporalities of illness, of reading, and of error? And what does his interest in these questions have to do with genre, particularly the relation between fact and fiction?