Introducing a unique 'timescape' perspective the author reexamines environmental problems and their cures and provides the potential for innovative new strategies to deal with environmental hazards.
Timescapes of Modernity explores the relationship between time and environmental and socio-cultural concerns. Using examples such as the BSE crisis, the Sea Empress oil pollution and the Chernobyl radiation Barbara Adam argues that environmental hazards are inescapably tied to the successes of the industrial way of life. Global markets and economic growth; large-scale production of food; the speed of transport and communication; the 24 hour society and even democratic politics are among the invisible hazards we face. With this unique 'timescape' perspective the author dislodges assumptions about environmental change, enables a rethinking of environmental problems and provides the potential for new strategies to deal with environmental hazards.
What happens when we blur time and allow ourselves to haunt or to become haunted by ghosts of the past? Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure demonstrates the value of conceiving of ghosts not just as metaphors, but as mechanisms for making the past more concrete and allowing the negative specters of enduring historical legacies, such as colonialism and capitalism, to be exorcised.
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.
Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.
In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. She argues that we are not mere hostages to communication devices, and the sense of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set rather than the machines that help us set them."--Jacket.
Time and Literature features twenty essays on topics from aesthetics and narratology to globalisation and queer temporalities, and showcases how time studies, often referred to as 'the temporal turn', cut across and illuminate research in every field of literature, as well as interdisciplinary approaches drawing upon history, philosophy, anthropology, and the natural sciences. Part one, Origins, addresses fundamental issues that can be traced back to the beginnings of literary criticism. Part two, Developments, shows how thinking about Time has been crucial to various interpretive revolutions that have impacted literary theory. Part three, Application, illustrates the centrality of temporal theorising to literary criticism in a variety of contemporary approaches, from ecocriticism and new materialisms to media and archive studies. The first anthology to provide a synthesis of recent scholarship on the temporality of literary language from across different national and historical periods, Time and Literature will appeal to academic researchers and interested laypersons alike.
It has become something of a critical commonplace to claim that science fiction does not actually exist in Argentina. This book puts that claim to rest by identifying and analyzing a rich body of work that fits squarely in the genre. Joanna Page explores a range of texts stretching from 1875 to the present day and across a variety of media-literature, cinema, theatre, and comics-and studies the particular inflection many common discourses of science fiction (e.g., abuse of technology by authoritarian regimes, apocalyptic visions of environmental catastrophe) receive in the Argentine context. A central aim is to historicize these texts, showing how they register and rework the contexts of their production, particularly the hallmarks of modernity as a social and cultural force in Argentina. Another aim, held in tension with the first, is to respond to an important critique of historicism that unfolds in these texts. They frequently unpick the chronology of modernity, challenging the linear, universalizing models of development that underpin historicist accounts. They therefore demand a more nuanced set of readings that work to supplement, revise, and enrich the historicist perspective.