Awards

• Nominated for Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies 2012
• Nominated for Modernist Studies Association Book Prize 2013
• Nominated for René Wellek Prize 2013
• Nominated for Warren-Brooks Award 2012

Overview

Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to convey the experience of time. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time-whether through an epiphany of memory, an immanent moment of being, or a transcendent afterlife. Martin Hägglund takes on these themes but gives them another reading entirely. The fear of time and death does not stem from a desire to transcend time, he argues. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in temporal life. From this vantage point, Hägglund offers in-depth analyses of Proust's Recherche, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Nabokov's Ada. Through his readings of literary works, Hägglund also sheds new light on topics of broad concern in the humanities, including time consciousness and memory, trauma and survival, the technology of writing and the aesthetic power of art. Finally, he develops an original theory of the relation between time and desire through an engagement with Freud and Lacan, addressing mourning and melancholia, pleasure and pain, attachment and loss. Dying for Time opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.

Full Product Details

9780674066328

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Reviews

Martin Hagglund has changed forever how we see the modern novel's relation to time. Richly argued and lyrical in its celebration of narrative experience, his book shows that what animates the pages of Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov is not the longing for immortality but the keen wish to continue in time.--Elaine Scarry, Harvard University

This book takes a shot across the bow of literature, reexamining the great works of Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov. Martin Hagglund takes on other professors of literature in how they interpreted these great authors. He leaves no stone unturned and no major work untouched...Hagglund makes a convincing argument.--Kevin Winter San Francisco Book Review (02/12/2013)

Martin Hagglund argues that the many apparently conflicting interpretations of Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov all impose a metaphysics of timeless being on the texts they interpret, and demonstrates how a radically new, chronolibinal reading of these same texts can be performed, one that is no longer determined by the desire to transcend time. As in his earlier, seminal reading of Derrida, Radical Atheism , Hagglund demonstrates an astonishing ability to penetrate to the shared presuppositions that underlie diverse readings, and to clarify the most profound issues involved in impressively lucid prose.--Henry Staten, University of Washington

Author Information

Martin Hägglund is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University.

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