Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores how modernity gives rise to temporal disorders when time cannot be assimilated and integrated into the realm of lived experience. Inspired by Walter Benjamin''s description of the shock experience of modernity through readings of Baudelaire, the book turns to Baudelaire and Flaubert in order to derive insights into the many temporal disorders (such as trauma, addiction, and fetishism) that pervade contemporary culture.
Through close readings of Baudelaire''s Flowers of Evil and Flaubert''s Madame Bovary, Elissa Marder argues that these nineteenth-century texts can, paradoxically, make us aware of aspects of present-day life that are not easily described or perceived. Following reflections by Benjamin, Jameson, and Lyotard, she shows that the ability to measure time increases in inverse proportion to the human ability to express it and create meaning through it. Although we have increased our ability to record events, we have become collectively
Trade Review
"This book is stunning in its ability to range widely and effectively over some of the most important, contested, and misunderstood regions of contemporary literary and cultural theory. A major and most welcome contribution to the study of two great canonical French authors, it is also a subtle but cogent intervention in the ongoing attempt to define and theorize a relation between the catchall concepts 'modernism' and 'postmodernism.'" -- Kevin Newmark * Boston College *
