Kristeva as always brings a resourceful and sophisticated theoretical awareness to her interpretive work. By translating much of Proust´s post-symbolic discourse on literature into her own psychoanalytic idiom, she invites us to reread him with an innocence and an enthusiasm that today, in this age of suspicion we call our own, are becoming rare.
Kristeva's Proust and the Sense of Time (LJ 9/1/93), based on four lectures she gave at Canterbury in 1992, is a precursor to this title. While in that earlier study Kristeva's psychoanalytic approach revealed Proust's psyche, this detailed and well-documented work highlights even more effectively Kristeva's use of "inter-textuality" to demonstrate how, in the vast space of Proust's novel (where historical time, past, and present are interwoven), we can, through both memory and the literary creation, "experience the sense of time and sense that time is getting away from us." Style and approach here are personal and, at times, approximate the tone of causerie (a mix of long, evocative sentences and short phrases unconnected by verbs). This translation is quite faithful to the original, but Kristeva's tone does not always prevail. Nonetheless, the reader will find it to be an intellectual delight.-Danielle Mihram, Univ. of Southern California
Offers up a fresh and incisive reading of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu .
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
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.
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.
