Not only a meditation on Proust, this is a commentary on how the experience of literature is manifested in time and sensation. Julia Kristeva uses Proust as a starting point to reflect upon broader notions of character, time, sensation, metaphor, and history.
Praised by Le Monde as Julia Kristeva's most important work to date, Time and Sense is a major reassessment of Marcel Proust and In Search of Lost Time. Not only a meditation on Proust, this is a commentary on how the experience of literature is manifested in time and sensation. Kristeva uses Proust as a starting point to reflect upon broader notions of character, time, sensation, metaphor, and history.
Reviews
What makes Time and Sense an important and enlivening book . . . is that Kristeva is a critic of great psychoanalytic insight who is also finely sensitive to the complex rhetorical and syntactical elaboration of Proust's world. -- Peter Brooks * New York Times Book Review * Offers up a fresh and incisive reading of Proust's Ŕ la recherche du temps perdu. * Antioch Review * Delivers a reading of Proust that rigorously and, at times, in startlingly original fashion, addresses the epic content and structure of Prousts vision and language. . . . Kristevas exceptional work is worth all the effort it requires to wade through it. It marks time truly well-spent. * Modern Fiction Studies * The most remarkable feature of Time and Sense, however, is Kristevas writing style. . . . The result is a highly literary effect, a poetically charged tribute to the Proustian sentence in a voice that is simultaneously that of Kristeva and Proust. * European Journal of Womens Studies *
Translators Note
List of Abbreviations
Part I. The Characters Regained
1. Superimpositions
2. A Penchant for Classicism: Its Origins and Manifestations
3. Questions of Identity
Part II. When Saying Is Perceiving
4. The Experience of Time Embodied
5. A Tribute to the Metaphor
6. Is Sensation a Form of Language?
7. Proust the Philosopher
Part III. The Imaginary; or Geometry in Time
8. The Proustian Sentence
9. Losing Impatience
10. Time for a Long Time
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature.
