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Augustine articulates temporality as focus rather than duration. It encompasses the shift from the future through the present to the past. Yet this a-causal, free-floating concept of time has never been applied to the shape of Augustine’s own narrative in the Confessions, or to that other vintage Augustinian problem: predestination. This book examines Augustinian temporality by experimentally projecting it onto modern(ist) authors (Kleist, Henry James, Kafka, Beckett) who are less dependent on sequential narrative and more concerned with the fragility and sustainability of voice in time. Processed through this mill of unfamiliar readings, the poignant problem of Augustinian time is how focus can account for digression. How can one deal with an unfathomably brief notion of time while eternity’s longueur hovers over it?
Price: $198.00
Pages: 424
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Brill's Studies in Intellectual History
Publication Date:
05 October 2010
ISBN: 9789004189362
Format: Hardcover
"Engaged with both the philosophy and the theology of Augustine’s thought, without being beholden to either discipline [...] it is an incredibly cultivated, capacious book [...] Pranger is bringing Augustine into conversation with Proust, into conversation with Samuel Beckett, into conversation with Henry James. And he also comes back to music. Every now and then he engages the most unbelievably revealing metaphor from music."
Catherine Conybeare, "The Best Augustine Books", on https://fivebooks.com/best-books/augustine-catherine-conybeare
"Pranger has written a dense and difficult book of striking originality [...] this is a book that richly deserves to transform the disciplines it so tactfully subverts."
James Wetzel, The Journal of Religion Vol. 92, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 143-145.
Catherine Conybeare, "The Best Augustine Books", on https://fivebooks.com/best-books/augustine-catherine-conybeare
"Pranger has written a dense and difficult book of striking originality [...] this is a book that richly deserves to transform the disciplines it so tactfully subverts."
James Wetzel, The Journal of Religion Vol. 92, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 143-145.
M.B. Pranger, Ph.D. (1975), University of Amsterdam, is Professor emeritus at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on the literary aspects of monasticism (Bernard of Clairvaux and the Shape of Monastic Thought (Brill, 1994), The Artificiality of Christianity (Stanford, 2003).