Review by Choice Review
Ricci (humanities, Elizabethtown College) illuminates the thinking of leading figures in the modern Western philosophy and literary handling of time. He gives thoroughly lucid (if often redundant) explications of Husserl's phenomenology ("consciousness of internal time"), Heidegger's Dasein (temporal and ontological being) and Sorge (care or engagement with the world), Bergson's concept of duration (psychic simultaneity of past, present, future), and Ernst Troeltsch's notion of essence (creative formation of history out of a fusional awareness of past, present, future), and he articulates them well with key works of Goethe, Proust, Joyce, Mann, and others. (That said, the essays on Mann's Magic Mountain and Huxley's Time Must Have a Stop focus more on cultural and ethical preoccupations than on the relatively superficial temporal narrative devices that frame those works.) Ricci places the intellectual history within some compelling personal, professional, and political dynamics--e.g., disappointments, disaffections, and outright betrayals between Husserl, Edith Stein, and Heidegger; the personal fecklessness of the anti-"rime cult" Vorticist Wyndham Lewis and the fascist allegiance of both Lewis and Heidegger. Especially interesting is the epilogue, which connects the quirky dream-time-travel ideas of J. W. Dunne with the work of Flannery O'Brien, J. B. Priestly, T. S. Eliot, and others. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. R. J. Cirasa Kean University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
