Faculty

Joshua Landy

Associate Professor of French

104 Pigott Hall
650 723 4914
landy@stanford.edu
Office hours:
TH 12:00-2:00 and by appointment

Professor Joshua Landy is co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford, home to new major tracks in philosophical and literary thought.

Professor Landy has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies (French) and Director of Graduate Studies (French). In 1999 he received the Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence; in 1999-2000 he was awarded a Fellowship at the Humanities Center; in 2001 he received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. He is the editor, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel, of Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995), and the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford University Press, 2004). Philosophy as Fiction deals with issues of self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-fashioning in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, while raising the question of what literary form contributes to an engagement with such questions.

Professor Landy's next book will be entitled Formative Fictions: Literary Structures and the Life Well Lived. It will examine a variety of texts which seek to train, rather than to teach, their readers. An edited volume, The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, is also forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Interests

Philosophical literature (Proust, Beckett); literary philosophy (Plato, Montaigne); philosophy of literature (Nietzsche, ethical criticism, narrative theories of selfhood); Symbolist poetry (Mallarmé); the first-person novel

Education

1997: Ph.D., Comparative Literature (Dissertation: "The Cruel Gift: Lucid Self-Delusion in French Literature and German Philosophy, 1851-1914"), Princeton University
1991: M.A., Cambridge University
1988: B.A. Honors, French and German, Churchill College, Cambridge

Current courses

FRENGEN/ITALGEN 181 Philosophy and Literature (Winter)
IHUM 3 Epic Journeys, Modern Quests (Spring)

Recent courses

FRENGEN 227 Samuel Beckett
FRENLIT 132 19th and 20th Century France
FRENGEN 228E Getting Through Proust

Selected Publications

"Nietzsche, Proust, and Will-to-Ignorance." Philosophy and Literature 26, 2002: 1-23.
"Les moi en moi: The Proustian Self in Philosophical Perspective," New Literary History 32, 2001: 91-132.

Current Projects

Professor Landy's next book will be entitled Formative Fictions: Literary Structures and the Life Well Lived. It will examine a variety of texts which seek to train, rather than to teach, their readers.