Time and narrative in Stendhal

In this study, Benjamin McRae Amoss, Jr., examines the role of time in various works by Stendhal, demonstrating how the French writer's concern with temporality is reflected in his construction of narrative. Applying and expanding the theories proposed by Paul Ricoeur in Temps et recit, Amoss investigates Stendhal's use of narrative or quasi-narrative devices as a means of coming to terms with the perplexities of time and the human perception of it. Amoss focuses particularly on the ways in which Stendhal's shaping of narrative--both historical and fictional--mediates between cosmic time and individual lived time, or phenomenological time. His discussion moves from Stendhal's theoretical and polemical works, Racine et Shakespeare and De l'Amour, to the travel and historical writing of Promenades dans Rome, in which Stendhal relates the history of the city, exploring its identity in time. This, in turn, leads to an analysis of Stendhal's recounting of his own personal history and identity in Journal and La Vie de Henry Brulard, whose famous opening meditation set above the city of Rome ties it to the earlier Promenades. Amoss looks in depth, finally, at the novel La Chartreuse de Parme, which seems to take up where Henry Brulard leaves off, with a young Frenchman's discovery of Italy during the Napoleonic campaigns. A fresh addition to our understanding of one of the most important French writers of the early nineteenth century, this book is also a notable contribution to the study of narrative.