The Weather in Proust: An Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Reading Group

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s talks and essays written during roughly the last decade of her life have recently appeared in a book, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, titled The Weather in Proust. The first section, approximately three-quarters of the book, comprises Sedgwick’s work on and around Proust. Sedgwick’s rich and complex view of Proust emerges as she approaches his writing through discussions of topics such as Neoplatonism, Buddhism, Theory of Mind, autism, the poet C P Cavafy, Melanie Klein, and Sedgwick’s own artwork, to name a few. We will read this section of Sedgwick’s book. At each of our five meetings we will discuss one of the five chapters that compose this section. All participants in the seminar will be expected to have read the chapter for each meeting, to take an active part in the discussion, and to volunteer to help facilitate the discussion at one meeting. Attendance at all sessions of the seminar is highly desirable. There will be no lecturing or formal presentations. There also will be no writing assignments, but participants will be welcome to write commentaries and to share them with the group.

For more about The Weather in Proust, please see the recent review in the Los Angeles Review of Books by Maggie Nelson, a former student of Sedgwick’s who obtained her PhD from The Graduate Program in English at CUNY: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/finishing-touches