Landy, Joshua 1965-

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Landy, Joshua 1965-

PERSONAL:

Born 1965. Education: Churchill College, Cambridge, B.A., 1988; Cambridge University, M.A., 1991; Princeton University, Ph.D., 1997.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Stanford University, Pigott Hall, Rm. 104, Stanford, CA 94305-2005. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER:

Stanford University, Stanford, CA, professor of French.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence, Stanford University, 1999; Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, Stanford University, 2001.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) Thematics: New Approaches, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1995.

Philosophy As Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to journals, including Philosophy and Literature and New Literary History; also contributor to books, including The Cambridge Companion to Proust.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joshua Landy tackled an extremely challenging subject with his first book, Philosophy As Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, an analysis of Marcel Proust's Recherche. Proust, here, made his philosophical viewpoints all the more challenging for readers to access because of his use of an unreliable narrator, also named Marcel. French Forum critic Derek Schilling immediately pointed out how correct Landy's position is that the text in Proust's work cannot be taken at face value because the narrator's beliefs are not necessarily those of Proust. This, commented Schilling, "may appear self-evident, yet as the volume's copious footnotes reveal, critics continue to assume that Marcel ‘speaks for’ Proust, that the ‘key’ to characters lies in real-life figures, irrespective of the demands of fiction … , or that the work Marcel projects to write in Time Regained is the very text we have just read." Gary Kemp, writing in Philosophy and Literature, also praised Landy's study, remarking, "Landy's book delivers what has gone long and scandalously missing: a philosophical analysis of Proust's incomparable book that is muscular, concise, philosophically informed and sophisticated; logically rigorous, explanatorily fruitful, and meticulously answerable to its data, namely the text;h3 . The book should for a long time be inescapable for anyone writing philosophically about Proust, and perhaps for anyone writing philosophically about imaginative literature, full stop. It is that good, its themes that wide."