Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (review)

Pity the academic book reviewer! Inflation in the language of review is akin to what has happened to letters of recommendation: as a colleague recently observed, hiring and promotion committees are reduced to gauging the true warmth of a letter by counting the number of times the word “brilliant” figures in it. When it comes to reviews, few new books, it seems, lack stunning orginality, nor do most escape the prospect of forever changing their fields; a foregone conclusion insists that the author(s) treated will never again be read in the same way. It is therefore with some caution that I take up the challenge of reviewing Elissa Marder’s Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert). I do not wish to suggest that the book’s originality fails to stun, nor do I imagine that it hasn’t already shown signs of modifying the very terms in which we approach the subject(s) at hand. In fact, several years ago, even before Marder’s study had appeared in volume form, I witnessed a speaker at a Nineteenth-Century French Studies conference spark an unusually animated discussion merely by citing some of the key points of what was to become chapter four of Dead Time: “Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in Madame Bovary,” at the time an article in Diacritics. The problem lies not with Marder’s book, but rather with the paucity of a critical vocabulary which offers few avenues for true evaluation.