Proust and the Sense of Time: (European Perspectives: A Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, first 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 arrived at his concept of the primacy of memory and sensation.

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." Stephen Bann is professor emeritus of the history of art at Bristol University.

Review :
By translating much of Proust's postsymbolist discourse on literature into her own psychoanalytic idiom, [Kristeva] invites us to reread him with an innocence and an enthusiasm that . . . are becoming rare.-- "Modern Philology" Kristeva presents with characteristic insight a contemporary appreciation of Proustian aesthetics that represents a synthesis of her own critical capabilities as psychoanalyst and semiotician, and presents as well a dynamic and protean consideration of Proust that mirrors the very force of his own writing.-- "Nineteenth-Century French Studies" No critic of Proust I know of has explored more carefully than Kristeva the sources of what she calls Proust's philosophy.-- "Sewanee Review" One of the most insightful and beautifully written explorations of the Proustian metaphor that exist in either French or English.-- "European Journal of Women's Studies"