Dying for Time

The Swedish philosopher and literary scholar Martin Hgglund has swiftly established himself at the center of some of todays most lively intellectual debates Dying for Time delivers a revolutionary reading of the ways in which modernist writers express elemental aspects of human existence. In the process, it disproves the idea that deconstructionor, indeed, literary theory per seis always off-puttingly arid and abstract. Hgglunds approach is absolutely the opposite This is a book that brings literature and theory into forceful collision with lifes underlying realities. The resulting insight is resolutely atheistic: neither art nor thought allows access to another world of timeless perfection. Instead, each is irreducibly interwoven with the world in which we live. Some say that literary theory is dead, out of fashion, a thing of the past. But Hgglund shows how it can and should go on living: in unflinching fidelity to how it feels to be human. -- David Winters * Los Angeles Review of Books * What distinguishes this important book is that it allows us to understand these canonical modernist concerns [temporality, mourning, and desire] in a wholly new way It is the true nature of temporal experience that we are returned to by Hgglunds profound and brilliant book, a work of literary criticism as timely as it is untimely. -- Adam Kelly * Modernism/Modernity * This book takes a shot across the bow of literature, reexamining the great works of Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov. Martin Hgglund takes on other professors of literature in how they interpreted these great authors. He leaves no stone unturned and no major work untouched Hgglund makes a convincing argument. -- Kevin Winter * San Francisco Book Review * Dying for Time provides important readings of the works of Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov. Here again, Hgglund operates with the concept of survival, a vantage point that allows him to tackle difficult and central issues in the corpus of these authors. He has original and compelling analyses. -- Jean-Michel Rabat * Derrida Today * Dying for Time has much higher goals than simply challenging the established, traditional reading of Proust, Woolf and Nabokov with respect to questions such as time, mortality, memory or trauma and achieves more than it promises at its inception Apart from opening an innovative hermeneutical perspective on the works of Proust, Woolf and Nabokovwhich could prove itself very fruitful for further and more in depth literary and philosophical analysis of the textsHgglunds book successfully challenges the traditional understanding of time, finitude and temporal being and offers a sound solution to the paradoxical logic of desire. Although Hgglunds work is to some extent indebted to Derridas thinking, the concept of chronolibido can nevertheless be seen as one of the books original contributions to the revisal of the traditional understanding of time and our relation to it and to our temporal finitude. -- Paul-Gabriel Sandu * Metapsychology * A major intervention into psychoanalytic theory Hgglund offers a model of trauma that neither prescribes nor restricts the possibilities for ethical remembrance, replacing a static binary of working through vs. acting out with a provisional reckoning, invested not in traumas endless repetition but its surviving, shifting legacy. -- Sarah Senk * MLN * Against the dominant criticism surrounding the transcendent aesthetics of these authors, Hgglund powerfully articulates that the complex and nuanced connection between time and desire has been fundamentally misunderstood Hgglunds book skillfully and clearly demonstrates that the proof of chronolibido, the investment in mortal life and not the desire to transcend it, derives from the texts themselves. -- Nell Wasserstrom * Modern Language Studies * This book develops a signicant and original theory of desire, disputing tradi

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