Julia Kristeva’s Time and Sense is a major reassessment of Marcel Proust and In Search of Lost Time. Not only a meditation on Proust, it is also a commentary on how the experience of literature is manifested in time and sensation. Kristeva uses Proust as a starting point to reflect on broader notions of character, time, sensation, metaphor, and history.
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 À 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 Proust’s vision and language. . . . Kristeva’s 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 Kristeva’s 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 Women’s Studies
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.”
