The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory

Looking at a diverse range of texts including Marilyn French's The Women's Room , Philip Roth's Patrimony , the writings of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, and films such as Cinema Paradiso , Susannah Radstone argues that though time has been foregrounded in theories of postmodernism, those theories have ignored the question of time and sexual difference. The Sexual Politics of Time proposes that the contemporary western world has witnessed a shift from the age of confession to the era of memory. In a series of chapters on confession, nostalgia, the 'memories of boyhood' film and the memoir, Susannah Radstone sets out to complicate this claim. Developing her argument through psychoanalytic theory, she proposes that an attention to time and sexual difference raises questions not only about the analysis and characterization of texts, but also about how cultural epochs are mapped through time. The Sexual Politics of Time will be of interest tostudents and researchers of time, memory, difference and cultural change, in subjects such as Media and Cultural Studies, Sociology, Film Studies.

Susanna Radstone is Reader in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London.