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." - 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