Search

Representative of a unique literary genre and composed in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Icelandic Family Sagas rank among some of the world's greatest literature. Here, Heather O'Donoghue skilfully examines the notions of time and the singular textual voice of the Sagas, offering a fresh perspective on the foundational texts of Old Norse and medieval Icelandic heritage. With a conspicuous absence of giants, dragons, and fairy tale magic, these sagas reflect a real-world society in transition, grappling with major new challenges of identity and development. As this book reveals, the stance of the narrator and the role of time – from the representation of external time passing to the audience's experience of moving through a narrative – are crucial to these stories. As such, Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga draws on modern narratological theory to explore the ways in which saga authors maintain the urgency and complexity of their material, handle the narrative and chronological line, and offer perceptive insights into saga society. In doing so, O'Donoghue presents a new poetics of family sagas and redefines the literary rhetoric of saga narratives.

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This collection offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space can shape literary narratives and forms. The essays consider the representation of a range of literary cities from across the world and consider how an understanding of time, and time passing, can impact on our understanding of the primary texts. Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. In this volume, the contributions demonstrate how literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time.

Der Band erforscht das Interventionspotential kleinster Zeiteinheiten und fragt, wie literarische, musikalische und künstlerische Momentaufnahmen und Augenblicksaufzeichnungen mit Konzepten einer sprunghaften und diskontinuierlichen Zeitwahrnehmung korrespondieren. Die Beiträge zeigen, inwiefern der aktuelle Erregungsdiskurs über die Tyrannei des Moments und den flüchtigen Augenblick einen historischen Index hat und immer von dem unterschwelligen Mitlaufen der Reflexion über Subjektivität begleitet ist. Es werden verschiedene Modi des Entzugs von Moment und Augenblick offengelegt und gezeigt, wie die Auseinandersetzungsgeschichte auf diese Unzugänglichkeit mit einem eigenen Bilddenken reagiert. Mit Beiträgen von Eva Axer, Ursula Geitner, Toni Hildebrandt, Alexander Honold, Thomas Macho, Sigrid Nieberle, Birger Petersen, Eckhard Schumacher, Christian Wimplinger und Norbert Christian Wolf.

Das Datum ist ein Ready-made der Zeiterfahrung. Es ist gegenüber den kalendarisch fixierten Katastrophen unschuldig und gibt doch Anlass: zu Erinnerung und Wiederholung; zu Erzählung und Ereignis. Das Buch untersucht das Hervortreten des Datums aus dem Paratext, die Transgression seiner vermeintlichen Funktion, reine Indikation zu sein. Die Möglichkeitsform ist im Datum nicht nur mitgegeben, sondern mitaufgegeben. Das Buch stellt Phänomene aus bildender Kunst und Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Sowjetunion und Russland vor, in denen dies sichtbar, erzählbar, denkbar wird: Konstruktivistische Datumsbilder, Umdatierungen, Zeitungstage als Beispieltage, remontierende narrative Interventionen als Zeitgenoss•innenschaft, Datumsgedichte.

Einen Blick in das verlorene Paradies werfen, den eigenen Tod erleben – nirgends scheint die Relativität von Zeit und Raum greifbarer zu sein als im Traum. Der Band beleuchtet dieses Phänomen aus literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlicher, philosophischer und psychologischer Perspektive. Träume wurden in der Kulturgeschichte immer wieder als „anderer“ Erfahrungsmodus begriffen, in dem die Logik des Wachzustands zum Teil aufgehoben ist. Gerade diese Diskrepanz begründet eine bis in die Antike zurückreichende Faszination für den Traum, der im Kontext unterschiedlicher Deutungssysteme als Zugang zu neuen Erkenntnissen und verborgenen Wahrheiten gilt. Das trifft auch auf einen der zentralen Parameter menschlicher Wahrnehmung zu: die Zeit. Der Band befasst sich mit der Wahrnehmung von Zeit im Traum. Welches Potenzial bietet sie zur Darstellung historischer Ereignisse in literarischen Texten? Die Beiträge beleuchten verschiedene Aspekte der Thematik in einem Rahmen vom 10. Jahrhundert bis heute.

Welche Rolle spielt die Zeit in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur? Wie wird thematisiert, dass Kinder Zeit oft ganz anders wahrnehmen als Erwachsene? Und wie kann das Thema Zeit literaturdidaktisch erfolgreich bearbeitet werden? Diesen Fragen gehen die Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes aus literaturwissenschaftlicher und literaturdidaktischer Sicht nach. Aus ihren Antworten leiten die literaturdidaktischen Beiträge kompetenzorientierte Ansätze für den Literaturunterricht aller Altersstufen ab. Fakt ist, dass die kindliche Wahrnehmung von Zeit in der aktuellen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur explizit und in interessanten Wechselspielen zwischen Darstellendem und Dargestelltem verhandelt wird. Die kindliche Aneignung erwachsener, oftmals neoliberal strukturierter Zeitnutzungsmodelle verdichtet sich im Konflikt von absoluter Effizienz und einem Leben „in den Tag hinein“, von strategischer Planung „für die Zukunft“ und dem Wert des Augenblicks.

Women and Temporality in Literature and Cinema delves into the subject of literary and cinematic women characters entrapped in temporal spaces and their peculiar communication with visibility, enclosure, space and time in the setup of a sexual and temporal discord. It explores subjects such as youth, ageing, remembering, forgetting, and repeating within the larger realm of gendered temporalities that are essentially a nuanced and affective experience. In its entirety, this book has sought to locate and spell out both the damaging as well as the healing effects of temporality upon women's consciousness.

What does it mean to live through time and to form affective bonds? This book discusses how concepts of time, age and aging, and kinship produce and impact each other in a neoliberal, late-capitalist 21st century U.S. American context. Located at the nexus of American studies, queer theory, critical age(ing) studies, and studies on belonging, it features case studies from across contemporary U.S. American culture. To explore potential challenges to dominant concepts and narratives, the book turns to diverse forms of temporal, developmental, and relational rupture: the multiple temporalities and erratic aging processes, the queer time modes, and the alternative models of collectivity and affect of bodies across – and as they cross – genders and the (post)human condition. With its queer analyses of examples from transgressive sites of queer contestation as well as mainstream culture, the book also asks: is going mainstream and being anti-hegemonic necessarily and always mutually exclusive?

What is the political value of time, and where does that value reside? Should politics place its hope in future possibility, or does that simply defer action in the present? Can the present ground a vision of change, or is it too circumscribed by the status quo? In Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time, Mitchum Huehls contends that conventional treatments of time's relationship to politics are limited by a focus on real-world experiences of time. By contrast, the innovative literary forms developed by authors in direct response to political events such as the Cold War, globalization, the emergence of identity politics, and 9/11 offer readers uniquely literary experiences of time. And it is in these literary experiences of time that Qualified Hope identifies more complicated—and thus more productive—ways to think about the time-politics relationship. Qualified Hope challenges the conventional characterization of postmodernism as a period in which authors reject time in favor of space as the primary category for organizing experience and knowledge. And by identifying a common commitment to time at the heart of postmodern literature, Huehls suggests that the period-defining divide between multiculturalism and theory is not as stark as previously thought.

Depuis des années, Isabelle Daunais poursuit une réflexion tout à fait unique sur le roman, art majeur des Temps modernes. Lire et méditer comme elle le fait ici les grandes œuvres de l'histoire du roman (Cervantès, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Kundera, Philip Roth, Gabrielle Roy) aussi bien que certaines de ses réalisations les plus actuelles (Marie NDiaye, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hallgrímur Helgason, Yannis Kiourtsakis ou Dominique Fortier) n'est pas un exercice d'érudition, mais une véritable quête philosophique et morale, l'examen – à travers des personnages et des univers fictifs – de certaines des questions les plus concrètes et les plus pressantes que nous nous posons du seul fait de vivre la vie que nous vivons, faite d'incertitude, d'imperfection, de temps qui passe, bref, de simple et commune humanité. Avec la sensibilité, l'intelligence, la culture et l'imagination critique qui illuminent sa pensée comme sa prose, Isabelle Daunais explore dans la vingtaine de textes qui composent La Vie au long cours une dimension essentielle de l'art romanesque qui passe trop souvent inaperçue : de toutes les formes d'art, le roman est le seul qui a le pouvoir (et le souci) de saisir la vie humaine et le monde dans leur durée. Plus qu'aux moments mémorables ou spectaculaires qui ponctuent la vie et parfois la transforment, c'est à la continuité du monde et de la réalité qu'il s'intéresse, à tout ce que les actions, les désirs ou les révoltes de l'individu n'atteignent pas et qui, à long terme et quoi qu'il arrive, demeure le fond permanent de l'existence humaine, sa base, son appui. La vie, nous dit le roman, est une entreprise au long cours, dans laquelle le réel finit toujours par triompher du rêve, les petites choses des grands mots, et l'ordinaire de l'exceptionnel. Toujours le monde résiste, et c'est cette résistance qui en fait un lieu à la fois d'humilité, de consolation et de beauté.

This book is a collective effort to investigate and problematise notions of time and temporality in European travel writing from the late medieval period up to the late nineteenth century. It brings together nine researchers in European travel writing and covers a wide range of areas, travel genres, and languages, coherently integrated around the central theme of time and temporalities. Taken together, the contributions consider how temporal aspects evolve and change in regard to spatial, historical, and literary contexts. In a chapter-by-chapter account this volume thus offers various case studies that address the issue of temporality by showing, for example, how time is inscribed in landscape, how travellers'encounters with other temporalities informed other disciplines; it interrogates the idea of'cultural temporalities'in regard to a tension between past and future, passivity and progression; and focuses on how time is entangled in identity construction proper to travelogues.

This book analyses the cultural and theatrical intersections of early modern temporal concepts and gendered identities. Through close readings of the works of Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood and others, across the genres of domestic comedy, city comedy and revenge tragedy, Sarah Lewis shows how temporal tropes are used to delineate masculinity and femininity on the early modern stage, and vice versa. She sets out the ways in which the temporal constructs of patience, prodigality and revenge, as well as the dramatic identities that are built from those constructs, and the experience of playgoing itself, negotiate a fraught opposition between action in the moment and delay in the duration. This book argues that looking at time through the lens of gender, and gender through the lens of time, is crucial if we are to develop our understanding of the early modern cultural construction of both.

Warum verschwindet Parzival für lange Zeit aus seiner Erzählung? Wie wird in Wolframs Dichtung von Transzendenz(erfahrung) erzählt? Welche Rolle spielen die anderen Figuren und ihre Geschichten für das Erzählen von Parzivals âventiure? Antworten geben die Analyse narrativer Verfahren der Zeit, welche die Identitätskonstruktion des Helden bestimmen, sowie die Betrachtung der âventiure als symbolisch generalisiertes Kommunikationsmedium. Die konsequent narratologisch ausgerichtete Fragestellung wird mit den soziologischen Überlegungen Niklas Luhmanns zur religiösen Kommunikation und ihrer Leitdifferenz von Immanenz und Transzendenz, zudem mit Paul Ricoeurs Reflexionen zur Aporie der Zeitlichkeit und seiner Idee der narrativen Identität verknüpft. Die Organisation und Struktur der Erzählung werden auf diese Weise mit der für den Parzival relevanten Frage nach den Unverfügbarkeitskonstruktionen enggeführt. Damit gelingt eine neue Perspektive auf einen der bedeutendsten Romane des Hochmittelalters. Beispielhaft vorgeführt wird zudem, wie der wechselseitige Zusammenhang von Zeit, Erzählung und Lebenszeit des Helden analytisch gefasst werden kann.

Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future—and their relationship to the present—been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or as atavistic origin narratives rooted in nation, race, or tribe. The future, meanwhile, has lost its utopian glamor, with the belief in progress and hope for a better future eroded by fears of ecological collapse.In this provocative book, Aleida Assmann argues that the apparently solid moorings of our temporal orientation have collapsed within the span of a generation. To understand this profound cultural crisis, she reconstructs the rise and fall of what she calls'time regime of modernity'that underpins notions of modernization and progress, a shared understanding that is now under threat. Is Time Out of Joint? assesses the deep change in the temporality of modern Western culture as it relates to our historical experience, historical theory, and our life-world of shared experience, explaining what we have both gained and lost during this profound transformation.

This volume offers new insights into ancient figurations of temporality by focusing on the relationship between gender and time across a range of genres.Each chapter in this collection places gender at the center of its exploration of time, and the volume includes time in treatises, genealogical lists, calendars, prophetic literature, ritual practice and historical and poetic narratives from the Greco-Roman world. Many of the chapters begin with female characters, but all of them emphasize how and why time is an integral component of ancient categories of female and male. Relying on theorists who offer ways to explore the connections between time and gender encoded in narrative tropes, plots, pronouns, images or metaphors, the contributors tease out how time and gender were intertwined in the symbolic register of Greek and Roman thought. Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity provides a rich and provocative theoretical analysis of time—and its relationship to gender—in ancient texts. It will be of interest to anyone working on time in the ancient world, or students of gender in antiquity.

Through an engagement with the philosophies of Proust's contemporaries, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel, Suzanne Guerlac presents an original reading of Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu). Challenging traditional interpretations, she argues that Proust's magnum opus is not a melancholic text, but one that records the dynamic time of change and the complex vitality of the real. Situating Proust's novel within a modernism of money, and broadening the exploration through references to cultural events and visual technologies (commercial photography, photojournalism, pornography, the regulation of prostitution, the Panama Scandal, and the Dreyfus Affair), this study reveals that Proust's subject is not the esthetic recuperation of loss but rather the adventure of living in time, on both the individual and the social level, at a concrete historical moment.

In this collection of essays, Maurizio Ferraris explores the world portrayed in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. He ponders how memory is tied to self-identification and knowledge; how the passage of time is only perceptible after it has passed; and how life, ultimately, is accurately portrayed in literature in ways that were seen as inconceivable in our youth. Running throughout the book is the sense that memory is all we are; we are what we remember or what others remember of us.

The temporal structure of Wuthering Heights has long been regarded as opaque or even flawed. This is explained by the fact that the years 1778, 1801 and 1802do not entirely cohere with the numerous relative time references in the novel if, as scholarship contends, the years 1801 and 1802 refer to Ellen Dean's narration of the story. By means of mathematically precise calculations and a grammatical analysis of the text, this critical new approach argues that the time frame of Wuthering Heights is sound if the years 1801 and 1802 date the writing of Mr. Lockwood's diary. The crucial differentiation between the recording of Mr. Lockwood's diary and the narration of Ellen Dean's story leads to a deeper understanding of the intentions of the two narrators and the behaviour of the protagonists.

Literature and Modern Time is a collection of essays that explore literature in the context of a wave of challenges to linear conceptions of time introduced by thinkers such as Bergson, Einstein, McTaggart, Freud and Nietzsche. These challenges were not uniform in character. The volume will demonstrate that literature of the era under scrutiny was not simply reacting to new theories of time—in some cases it is actually inspiring and anticipating them. Thus Literature and Modern Time promises to offer a genuine dialogue between literature and time theory and in doing so will uncover and examine influences and connections— sometimes unexpected—between philosophers and writers of the era. It will examine literary attempts to transcend and escape time and also challenge rupture-based accounts of modernist time by demonstrating that literary texts commonly associated with brokenness, decline or stasis, also, at the same time, maintain faith in healing, renewal and mobility.This collection contains interdisciplinary research of the quite highest kind - to see so many different kinds of time - narrative, historical, mechanical, subjective, non-linear time, myth and nostalgia - as well as time/space discussed here is very stimulating indeed.Professor Simon James

Despite our brief tenure on planet Earth, Homo sapiens have reached an epoch—the Anthropocene—that is characterised by our species'uncanny ability to spoil our own nest. In the face of this somber reality of ecological degradation and massive species extinction, the editors ask the critical question, “What does living well look like in the Anthropocene?” It is vitally important that we turn towards the cultivation of eco-virtues, a new set of values by which to live, if there is to be hope for us and other species to continue. These essays inspire readers not just to ponder, but to embody and live the ideals of these timeless ecological virtues.

This book reveals the unique contribution made by the three founding fathers of British fantasy—Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison and J. R. R. Tolkien—to our culture's perennial reassessment of the meanings of time, death and eternity. It traces the poetic, philosophical and theological roots of the striking preoccupation with mortality and temporality that defines the imagined worlds of early fantasy fiction, and gives both the form of such fiction and its ideas the attention they deserve. Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien raise some of the oldest questions in existence: about the limits of nature, human and divine; cosmic creation and destruction; the immortality conferred by art and memory; and the paradoxes and uncertainties generated by the universal experience of transience, the fear of annihilation and the desire for transcendence. But they respond to those questions by means of thought experiments that have no precedent in modern literary history.This book has won the'2021 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award'for Myth and Fantasy Studies.

Greek and Roman stories of origin, or aetia, provide a fascinating window onto ancient conceptions of time. Aetia pervade ancient literature at all its stages, and connect the past with the present by telling us which aspects of the past survive'even now'or'ever since then'. Yet, while the standard aetiological formulae remain surprisingly stable over time, the understanding of time that lies behind stories of origin undergoes profound changes. By studying a broad range of texts and by closely examining select stories of origin from archaic Greece, Hellenistic Greece, Augustan Rome, and early Christian literature, Time in Ancient Stories of Origin traces the changing forms of stories of origin and the underlying changing attitudes to time: to the interaction of the time of gods and men, to historical time, to change and continuity, as well as to a time beyond the present one. Walter provides a model of how to analyse the temporal construction of aetia, by combining close attention to detail with a view towards the larger temporal agenda of each work. In the process, new insights are provided both into some of the best-known aetiological works of antiquity (e.g. by Hesiod, Callimachus, Vergil, Ovid) and lesser-known works (e.g. Ephorus, Prudentius, Orosius). This volume shows that aetia do not merely convey factual information about the continuity of the past, but implicate the present in ever new complex messages about time.

The concept of “time-image,” this book argues, holds broad potential for the historical interpretation of cultural and aesthetic works. Many works that would not ordinarily be thought to be historical artifacts reveal their intrinsic historical character in light of this innovative interpretative concept.The book's first section,“Time-Images as Theory and Historiography,” considers alternative temporalities underlying historicizing theories and specific practices of history. Examples treated here include the notion of “retro-avantgardism,” works by the Frankfurt School on the interrelations of images and history, and Mass Observation's dream documentation project. The second section, “Time-Images in Modernist and Postmodernist Literature,” considers literary instances in which alternative notions of historical time are engaged. These include discussions of Wyndham Lewis and “cultural revolution,” Theodor Adorno's reading of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's use of Antonio Gramsci in the practice of poetry and philology.The third section, “Moving Images of Time,” discusses questions of cinema including children's experience in films depicting traumatic historical events, the Quay Brothers'animated adaptation of Bruno Schulz's “Street of Crocodiles,” and Sergei Eisenstein's and Charles Olson's engagements in Mexico with pictographic representation, etymology, and archeological time.

San-Antonio ou le temps majuscule : un titre qui sonne comme une gageure voire un défi. Sans doute, mais San-Antonio est beaucoup plus qu'un saltimbanque de la littérature, comme il se définit modestement. Pendant plus de quarante ans, le temps va se révéler la véritable obsession du romancier de Bourgoin-Jallieu, à la fois démarche intellectuelle et perception psychologique à la limite du pathologique. À l'aune implacable de Kronos, la vieillesse, la mort, l'enfance, l'amour, la fragilité de l'instant, l'éternité : autant de thèmes «poétiques» où l'écriture va s'épanouir lyriquement ou se briser dramatiquement, de l'acceptation résignée à la révolte instinctive et du vertige fasciné à l'amertume poignante. Car le temps se révèle, pendant plus de quarante ans, la véritable obsession du romancier, Frédéric Dard, conteur talentueux et jongleur verbal, écrivain méconnu, viscéralement tourmenté et éperdu de tendresse.

Modernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the shapes of time, the consistency of timespace and the nature of history.

This book explores the intersection between the recent work on queer temporality and the experiments of literary modernism. Kate Haffey argues that queer theory's recent work on time owes a debt to modernist authors who developed new ways of representing temporality in their texts. By reading a series of early twentieth-century literary texts from modernists like Woolf, Eliot, Faulkner, and Stein alongside contemporary authors, this book examines the way in which modernist writers challenged narrative conventions of time in ways that both illuminate and foreshadow current scholarship on queer temporality. In her analyses of contemporary novelists and critics Michael Cunningham, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, and Eve Sedgwick, Haffey also shows that these modernist temporalities have been reconfigured by contemporary authors to develop new approaches to futurity.

This volume trace ways in which time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist culture, from the beginning of the twentieth century until the decade after World War II. Though modernism is often associated with revolutionary or futurist directions, this book argues instead that a retrograde dimension is embedded within it. By juxtaposing the literature of Europe and North America with that of Australia and New Zealand, it suggests how this antipodean context serves to defamiliarize and reconceptualize normative modernist understandings of temporal progression. Backgazing thus moves beyond the treatment of a specific geographical periphery as another margin on the expanding field of'New Modernist Studies'. Instead, it offers a systematic investigation of the transformative effect of retrograde dimensions on our understanding of canonical modernist texts. The title,'backgazing', is taken from Australian poet Robert G. FitzGerald's 1938 poem'Essay on Memory', and it epitomizes how the cultural history of modernism can be restructured according to a radically different discursive map. Backgazing intellectually reconfigures US and European modernism within a planetary orbit in which the literature of Australia and the Southern Hemisphere, far from being merely an annexed margin, can be seen substantively to change the directional compass of modernism more generally. By reading canonical modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot alongside marginalized writers such as Nancy Cunard and others and relatively neglected authors from Australia and New Zealand, this book offers a revisionist cultural history of modernist time, one framed by a recognition of how its measurement is modulated across geographical space.

The book shows Chekhov in a new light, as a writer with a synthetic ethical worldview on which his poetics are based. The book's key finding is that the temporal experience of modernity lies at the centre of Chekhov's work. This conclusion is reached by comparing the ways in which modern temporality is represented in the different genres in which Chekhov wrote, from the non-fictional Sakhalin Island to his short fiction and drama. In terms of methodology, the book combines the historiographical and sociological views of modernity as based on a certain understanding of time with Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope.

David Bergelson (1884–1952) emerged as a major literary figure who wrote in Yiddish before WWI. He was one of the founders of the Kiev Kultur-Lige and his work was at the center of the Yiddish-speaking world of the time. He was well known for creating characters who often felt the painful after-effects of the past and the clumsiness of bodies stumbling through the actions of daily life as their familiar worlds crumbled around them. In this contemporary assessment of Bergelson and his fiction, Harriet Murav focuses on untimeliness, anachronism, and warped temporality as an emotional, sensory, existential, and historical background to Bergleson's work and world. Murav grapples with the great modern theorists of time and memory, especially Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, to present Bergelson as an integral part of the philosophical and artistic experiments, political and technological changes, and cultural context of Russian and Yiddish modernism that marked his age. As a comparative and interdisciplinary study of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture, this work adds a new, ethnic dimension to understandings of the turbulent birth of modernism.

In Precarious Times, Anne Fuchs explores how works of German literature, film, and photography reflect on the profound temporal anxieties precipitated by contemporary experiences of atomization, displacement, and fragmentation that bring about a loss of history and of time itself and that is peculiar to our current moment.The digital age places premiums on just-in-time deliveries, continual innovation, instantaneous connectivity, and around-the-clock availability. While some celebrate this 24/7 culture, others see it as profoundly destructive to the natural rhythm of day and night—and to human happiness. Have we entered an era of a perpetual present that depletes the future and erodes our grasp of the past?Beginning its examination around 1900, when rapid modernization was accompanied by comparably intense reflection on changing temporal experience, Precarious Times provides historical depth and perspective to current debates on the'digital now.'Expanding the modern discourse on time and speed, Fuchs deploys such concepts as attention, slowness and lateness to emphasize the uneven quality of time around the world.

This book examines the experience of time functions in a specific set of British novels to reveal the persistence of the utopian imagination in the twenty-first century. Through close textual analysis, Edwards develops a new strategy of reading such anticipatory'fictions of the not yet', including novels by Hari Kunzru, Maggie Gee, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Jim Crace, Joanna Kavenna, Grace McCleen, Jon McGregor, and Claire Fuller. Read in the context of the philosophical category of non-contemporaneity, these novels reveal a significant new direction in twenty-first-century fiction. Their formal inventiveness and suggestively non-mimetic encounters with otherwise realist narrative representations of contemporary experience open up a realm of utopian possibility that shines through in moments of temporal alterity: glimpses of the future, redeemed strands of past hopes, and alternative social worlds already alive in the present.

Biological Time, Historical Time presents a new approach to 19th century thought and literature: by focussing on the subject of time, it offers a new perspective on the exchanges between French and German literary texts on the one hand and scientific disciplines on the other. Hence, the rivalling influences of the historical sciences and of the life sciences on literary texts are explored, texts from various scientific domains – medicine, natural history, biology, history, and multiple forms of vulgarisation – are investigated. Literary texts are analysed in their participation in and transformation of the scientific imagination. Special attention is accorded to the temporal dimension: this allows for an innovative account of key concepts of 19th century culture.

Time, Consciousness and Writing brings together a collection of critical reflections on Peter Malekin's “model of the mind”, which he saw as a crucial yet often neglected aspect of critical theory in relation to theatre, literature and the arts. The volume begins with a selection of Peter Malekin's own writings that lay out his critique of western culture, its overstated claims to universal competence and validity, and lays out an alternative view of consciousness that draws partly on Asian traditions and partly on underground traditions from the west. The essays that follow, commissioned for this volume, critically examine Malekin's ideas, drawing out their implications in a variety of contexts including theatre, liturgical performance, poetry and literature. The book ends with an assessment of future prospects opened by this work.

Gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bricht in der europäischen Literatur eine Wartezeit an, die quer steht zum Paradigma von Fortschritt, Beschleunigung und Produktivität. An die Stelle zielgerichteter Erwartungen tritt ein Verharren im Übergang, das neue dramatische und erzählerische Formen begründet. Andrea Erwig geht den Darstellungsformen, Eigenzeiten und Phantasmen des Wartens u. a. bei Maeterlinck, Rilke, Musil und Freud nach und widmet sich dabei auch Warteräumen und institutionellen Machttechniken. Das literarische Warten zeigt sich in ihrer Studie von einer subversiven Seite: Die ›Waiting Plots‹ der frühen Moderne stemmen sich gegen die Bestimmtheit von Erwartungen und unterbrechen das lineare Fortschreiten von Geschichte, um sich dem Unbestimmten und Singulären der Wirklichkeit zu verschreiben. Das Fin de siècle erscheint aus dieser Perspektive als Übergangszeit, die Endgültigkeiten nicht nur beschwört, sondern sich diesen zugleich widersetzt.

How do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world and reach the readers of an unknowable future? Modernist writers were eager to think of their books as reaching audiences they could not yet imagine. In recent years however, scholars of modernism have focused on pinning them down: putting these books in their context and these authors in their place. By looking to the future, scholars fear that looking to the future will make literature disengaged, irresponsible, or apolitical; the worry is that literature cannot escape its own moment without also evading the hard truths of history. Out of Context suggests an alternative to this scholarship, proposing that literature travels through time not by transcending history, but by adapting to historical change. The chapters of this book each pair a modernist author with a later reader. In each case, this future reader is also a novelist--someone who reads with an eye to form and craft, and who puts what they see to new use in their own novels. James Baldwin adapts Henry James's modes of characterization; Ngugi wa Thiong'o repurposes Joseph Conrad's nonchronological narratives; and Ken Kesey builds on William Faulkner's use of multiple perspectives. Reading the modernists through these authors'eyes offers a different perspective on them. Literary forms, in this history, do not have intrinsic political meanings; they have a multitude of political uses. Rather than see modernist literary form, in all its fragmentation and complexity, as a source of disruption and doubt, these later authors use modernist forms to distill doubts into conviction. The experiments of modernist fiction stand revealed as tools not of political critique but of political commitment.

This book scrutinizes physical, temporal and psychological strata across early twentieth-century literature, focusing on geological and archaeological tropes and conceptions of the stratified psyche. The essays explore psychological perceptions, from practices of envisioning that mimic looking at a painting, photograph or projected light, to the comprehension of the palimpsestic complexities of language, memory and time. This collection is the first to see early twentieth-century physical, temporal and psychological strata interact across a range of canonical and popular authors, working in a variety of genres, from theatre to ghost stories, children's literature to modernist magna opera.

A new view of the way modernist fiction writers tried to solve the problem of time.Do our fictions transform time? Do they cultivate the temporal environment? Such was the hope—or the fantasy—at work in many modernist novels for which time was not only the major subject but also an object of reparative aspiration. Aimed at a kind of stewardship of time, these fictions constitute a practice of modernist time ecology: an effort to restore those landscapes of time that have been thrown into crisis by modernity. In Modernist Time Ecology, Jesse Matz redefines temporal experimentation in central writers like Proust, Mann, Woolf, Ellison, and Cather, who developed literary forms to cultivate, restore, and enrich the temporal environment. He brings fresh attention to others who best exemplify this ecological motive, arguing that E. M. Forster, J. B. Priestley, and V. S. Naipaul are leading figures in this practice of temporal redress. Matz also reveals how contemporary film, social media movements, and public service efforts show what has become of the modernist interest in temporal stewardship. Matz combines an array of disciplines—including narrative theory, sociology, phenomenology, cognitive psychology, film studies, queer theory, and environmental studies—to theorize and explain the rationale and the limits to the idea that time might be subject to textual cultivation. Modernist Time Ecology is a deeply interdisciplinary book that changes what we think literature and the arts can do for the world at large.

Volume 200 in the North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures series.

Im lyrischen Werk der polnischen Nobelpreisträgerin Wisława Szymborska bildet die Auseinandersetzung mit der Zeit ein Zentrum der poetischen Reflexion, das in diesem Buch erstmals systematisch erschlossen wird. Das Augenmerk liegt dabei auf jenem virtuosen Prozedieren zwischen den Diskursarten, das der umfassenden Bildung der Dichterin verdankt ist und ihre Sonderstellung in der polnischen Lyrik begründet. Die Analyse konzentriert sich auf mehrere zentrale Fragenkomplexe, die in Szymborskas OEuvre immer wieder aufgegriffen werden: Es geht um das Verhältnis von Zeit und Ewigkeit, Zufall und Notwendigkeit, Zeit und Veränderung, um die verschiedenen möglichen Topologien des zeitlichen Geschehens, um die Frage nach der Entstehung und Beschaffenheit des menschlichen Zeitbewusstseins und um die Problematik der Dreiteilung der Zeit in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft.