Proust and the Sense of Time
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-BinghamtonCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.