With a wealth of papers in its pages, this book examines that fundamental of human philosophy, the relationship between human beings and time. Having the human subject – the creator – at its center, literature is essentially engaged in temporality whether that of the mind or of the world of life through the creative process of writing, stage directing, or the reader’s and viewer’s reception. This text examines, among others, the work of Proust and Kafka.

Proposes a theoretically rich treatment of temporality within exile as “gerundive” time. This book is a philosophical reflection on the experience of time from within exile. Its focus on temporality is unique, as most literature on exile focuses on the experience of space, as exile involves dislocation, and moods of nostalgia and utopia. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback proposes that in exile, time is experienced neither as longing back to the lost past nor as wanting a future to come but rather as a present without anchors or supports. She articulates this present as a “gerundive” mode, in which the one who is in exile discovers herself simply being, exposed to the uncanny experience of having lost the past and not having a future. To explore this, she establishes a conversation among three authors whose work has exemplified this sense of gerundive time: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot, and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The book does not aim to discuss how these authors understand the relation between time and exile, but presents a conversation with them in relation to this question that reflects new aspects in their work. Attempting to think and express this difficult sense of time from within exile, Time in Exile engages with the relation between thought and language, and between philosophy and literature. Departing from concrete existential questions, Sá Cavalcante Schuback reveals new philosophical and theoretical modes to understand what it means to be present in times of exile. “It is very rare that one can find in philosophy a book that has been written neither as a commentary, nor as an exegesis of the authors in question, but rather as an original and thought-provoking reflection in which the author is the main philosophical voice in the book.” — María del Rosario Acosta López, coeditor of Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Fredrich Schiller and Philosophy

Novels by Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time. Hägglund gives them another reading entirely: fear of time and death is generated by investment in temporal life. Engaging with Freud and Lacan, he opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.

Although the broad topic of time and literature in the long eighteenth century has received focused attention from successive generations of literary critics, this book adopts a radically new approach to the subject. Taking inspiration from recent revisionist accounts of the horological practices of the age, as well as current trends in ecocriticism, historical prosody, sensory history, social history, and new materialism, it offers a pioneering investigation of themes that have never previously received sustained critical scrutiny. Specifically, it explores how the essayists, poets, playwrights, and novelists of the period meditated deeply upon the physical form, social functions, and philosophical implications of particular time-telling objects. Consequently, each chapter considers a different device – mechanical watches, pendulums, sandglasses, sundials, flowers, and bells – and the literary responses of significant figures such as Alexander Pope, Anne Steele, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, and William Hazlitt are carefully examined.

Detaining Time is the first book to investigate the representation of time in literature in terms of the project to reconceptualize time, so that its movement no longer threatens security. Focusing on the nature, consequences, and resolution of resistance to temporal passage, Eric P. Levy offers detailed and probing close readings, enriched by thorough yet engaging explication and application of prominent philosophical theories of time. Philosophy is here employed not as a rigid model to which literature is forced to conform, but instead as a lens through which elements crucial to the literary texts can be isolated and clarified, even as they concern ideas different from those expounded in philosophy. The literary texts treated include Hamlet, Hard Times, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, a wide range of Beckettian works, and Enduring Love – texts distinguished by their challenging, relentless, original, and dramatic depiction of the struggle with temporality. The philosophies of time covered include those of Aristotle, Kant, Bergson, John McTaggart, C.D. Broad, Edmund Husserl and Gilles Deleuze.

Reimagining Communication: Experience explores the embodied and experiential aspects of media forms across a variety of contemporary platforms, uses, content variations, audiences, and professional roles. A diverse body of contributions offer a broad range of perspectives on memory, embodiment, time, and more. The volume is organized to reflect a pedagogical approach of carefully laddered and sequenced topics, which supports meaningful, project-based learning in addition to a course’s traditional writing requirements. As the field of Communication Studies has been continuously growing and reaching new horizons, this volume presents a survey of the foundational theoretical and methodological approaches that continue to shape the discipline, synthesizing the complex relationship of communication to forms of experience in a uniquely accessible and engaging way. This is an essential introductory text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and scholars of communication, media, and interactive technologies, with an interdisciplinary focus and an emphasis on the integration of new technologies.

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.

What does it mean to live in time, between the unforeseeable and the irreversible? In The Varieties of Temporal Experience, Michael Jackson demonstrates the significance of a phenomenology of time for ethnography, philosophy, and history through a multifaceted consideration of the gap between our cultural representations of temporality and the bewildering multiplicity of our experience of being-in-time. Jackson explores temporality in a subjective mode as a form of literary anthropology. The first part of the book tells the story of John Joseph Pawelka, whose 1910 escape from prison and subsequent disappearance became one of New Zealand’s great unsolved mysteries, discussing what it reveals about the interplay of popular stories, hidden histories, and media narratives in constructing allegories of national and moral identity. In the second, Jackson reflects on journeys up and down the islands of New Zealand, touching on the ways that personal stories are interwoven with social and historical events. Throughout this groundbreaking book, Jackson juxtaposes philosophy, history, and ethnography in an attempt to do justice to the extraordinary variety of temporal experience, at the same time exploring the ethical and existential quandaries that arise from the complexity of lived time.

This edited volume is the first to propose new readings of Italian and transnational female-authored texts through the lens of Trauma Studies. Illuminating a space that has so far been left in the shadows, Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing provides new insights into how the trope of trauma shapes the narrative, temporal and linguistic dimension of these works. The various contributions delineate a landscape of female-authored Italian and transnational trauma narratives and their complex textual negotiation of suffering and pathos, from the twentieth century to the present day. These zones of trauma engender a new aesthetics and a new reading of history and cultural memory as an articulation of female creativity and resistance against a dominant cultural and social order.

An expert explores the riddle of subjective time, from why time speeds up as we grow older to the connection between time and consciousness.