Proust and the Sense of Time [Hardcover]

Julia Kristeva (Author), Stephen Bann (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1993

Noted literary critic, psychoanalyst, and theorist Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, just delivered at the 1992 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury. Kristeva's first essay, "Proust and Time Embodied," takes a broadly psychoanalytical, linguistically sensitive approach to Proust's exploration of time and the operation of memory. Next in "In Search of Madeline," she delves into Proust's concept of the little cake that flooded him with the taste of childhood regained, providing an explanation for Proust's search for the deeper levels of childhood grounded in her psychoanalytic experience. Throughout Proust and the Sense of Time, Kristeva draws on Proust's notebooks and manuscripts, pointing out significant variations in the different versions of his work. She examines his early philosophical training and the philosophical trends in Paris at the turn of the century, seeking to explain how he his concept of the primacy of memory and sensation.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

A psychoanalyst and a major force in literary criticism since the publication in France of The Revolution in Poetic Lan guages in 1974 (Columbia Univ. Pr., 1984), Kristeva took up Proust for the University of Canterbury T.S. Eliot lectures in 1992. The result, presented here, is no unsettling "reading against the text." She would be expected to find Proust's relationship with his mother crucial to the genesis and development of the narrative. Although Kristeva brings her authority to bear on a discussion of Proust's susceptibility to the second-level French Schopenhauerians and his resistance to Bergson, she acknowledges her indebtedness to Anne Henry's work in the early 1980s. Kristeva also argues that Proust must have found reinforcement for his insights into the unconscious and the links between image, idea, and sensation in Gabriel Tarde, whose manuscripts were entrusted to Proust's teacher and tutor Alphonse Darlu. Bann has produced a fine translation of this key for the beginning Proust student.
- Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY-Binghamton
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Kristeva investigates several important rhetorical, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and sociological dimensions of Proust's novel...Every page offers the reader a new insight. The breathtaking intensity of her observations, the luminous brilliance of her reflections...point to a subtle and erudite mind actively engaged in reading a difficult work and taking great pleasure in the discovery that the reading has involved. -- Richard Stamelman Williams College

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 103 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (April 15, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231084781
• ISBN-13: 978-0231084789
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,391,042 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars remains state of the art in proust scholarship, April 5, 2009

By 

cvairag (Allan Hancock College) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Proust and the Sense of Time (Hardcover)

Major contribution to Proust scholarship, these lectures, delivered in the early 1990's, are quite useful to the student, as all the bases are covered in a svelte and tight presentation. When one reads Proust, there are a lot of pages to be read and analyzed, even more when dealing with the extensive critical tradition which his seminal novel has spawned. Thus, the concinnity of Kristeva's fluid, comprehensive, yet brief, analysis, not only displays a masterful reading of the text, but a much needed self-consious awareness of the essential secondary literature in this sprawling field. Kristeva's reading is diachronic, both in its consideration of the historical development of these materials (especially strong in her discussion of Deleuze's noted contribution to the discourse), and her rather deconstructive delineation of the development of tensions and disparities in modern existence as singularly, notoriously explicated at length in the La Recherche.

0 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars rather academic, February 13, 2009

By 

Patrick (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Proust and the Sense of Time (Hardcover)

This is a very dry and academic book and now, less than two weeks after finishing it, I cannot really remember much about it.