Cripping (with) Proust: Toward a Convalescent Athleticism

In a series of works from Contre Sainte-Beuve to Le Temps retrouvé , Proust develops an insistently convalescent literary practice, one grounded in a resistance to cure as resolution in health. Reading Proust's writing as a process of subversive self-doctoring, rather than a means to curative rehabilitation, my project argues for a Proustian 'convalescent athleticism' as an affirmatively asthmatic variant of Artaud's affective athleticism. In this 'crip' literary practice, Proust anticipates, and perhaps even exceeds, both Deleuze's athletic literature as 'little health' and the critique, in contemporary disability studies, of the compulsory able-bodiedness that, as Robert McRuer argues, lies at the core of all composition.