Time and the Literary

Time and the literary: the immediacy of information technology has supposedly annihilated both. Email, cell phones, satellite broadcasting seem to have ended the long-standing tradition of encoding our experience of time through writing. Paul de Man's seminal essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity" and newly commissioned essays on everything from the human genome to grammatical tenses argue, however that the literary constantly reconstructs our understanding of time. From eleventh-century France or a science-fiction future, Time and the Literary shows how these two concepts have been and will continue to influence each other.

Time and the literary: the immediacy of information technology has supposedly annihilated both. Email, cell phones, satellite broadcasting seem to have ended the long-standing tradition of encoding our experience of time through writing. Paul de Man's seminal essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity" and newly commissioned essays on everything from the human genome to grammatical tenses argue, however that the literary constantly reconstructs our understanding of time. From eleventh-century France or a science-fiction future, Time and the Literary shows how these two concepts have been and will continue to influence each other.

Karen Newman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University and is the author of Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science and Visuality. Jay Clayton is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and is the author of The Pleasures of Babel. Marianne Hirsch is Professor of French, Italian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College and is the author of Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory.