Elusive, fleeting, intangible—these are some of the adjectives often applied to the concept of time in both popular and scientific discourses, and Isabelle Wentworth raises no objections in her new book Catching Time: Temporality, Interaction, and Cognition (2024). She does, however, produce a new study on the perception of time and its intersubjective aspects for readers who might have already intuited these dimensions in the works of writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss, and Don DeLillo, and philosophers such as Tomas Aquinas, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, among others. Wentworth also actively engages with more recent cognitive approaches affiliated with neuroscience, and the result is a highly referential comparative text that boldly surveys literary theories, social and natural sciences, and original works of twenty-first-century fiction.
The six chapters of the book have copious references, endnotes, and an extensive bibliography following each chapter, which,...
