What can we know about the understanding of time in a particular
cultural or historical setting, and what can this knowledge tell us
about how we think about time today? Time and Ways of Knowing: Molière,
Sévigné, Lafayette raises these questions by examining the scientific
measurement and perception of time in seventeenth-century Europe and
particularly in France. This widely researched book argues that the
technological and social changes relating to time have a paradoxical
impact in seventeenth-century France; they lead to more control of the
individual, thus intruding upon the realm of the private, and at the
same time encourage the development of a newfound sense of privacy and
subjectivity, partly in reaction to the increasing control of the
individual by the state. This Foucaludian hypothesis is compellingly
developed through a number of critical readings in historical contexts:
the social framework of court life under Louis XIV is made to shed light
on Molière's theatrical time; an analysis of early modern French postal
reform reveals that concertedly diurnal nature of Mme de Sévigné's
letters; and the consideration of early French periodicals evoks
readers' reactions to Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, a novel
whose discourses proposed a new kind of narrative time. A conclusion
connects early modern historical questions of human temporality to
present-day environmental conerns. Time and Ways of Knowing is an
original, interdisciplinary study that will appeal to scholars of
seventeenth-century French literature and culture, and of the philosophy
of science, as wlel as to those interested in narrative, temporality,
and questions of disciplinary.
