Modernism/modernity

Time is having its moment. The subject of time has blossomed across literary and cultural studies, and for good reason. With climate change and the fate of the planet at stake in our daily lives, and the concept of the Anthropocene helping to shape the understanding of how we got here and where we are going, interest in time has profound consequences. It thus feels urgent to understand deep time, to consider distant futures, and to mark the effects of time on our ecologies, our bodies, and our communities. Scholars have accordingly leapt into this terrain with a sense of high stakes. In popular culture, the focus on time is perhaps less existential, but the play with time is similarly ubiquitous—of course the massive Marvel Avengers series could only be resolved in Endgame with the help of time travel. With the meta/multi-verse now stalking seemingly all pop cultural franchises, moreover, stay tuned for greater and more dizzying time scenarios unfurling with each new iteration. In many spheres, artists and creators are engaging with pasts, presents, and futures (as in the 2023 hit, Everything Everywhere All at Once), [End Page 201] immersive technologies aiding in the project of inhabiting not only alternative spaces, but also counterintuitive timelines. On top of this, the pandemic has focused the way we experience time into almost universal consideration: everyone knows that "pandemic time" is a real thing (lost years, days that lasted into months, confusion about what happened when, and always the new marker, "pre-pandemic," even if "post-pandemic" is not yet quite conceivable).

Modernism, a movement which is currently celebrating its various centenaries, turns out to be timely; its works are stocked with all manner of temporal topics and its explorations remain pertinent to today's dilemmas. After all, modernism took time as its overt and constant subject. Synchronicity was one of its formal hallmarks, and its novels espoused a preference for such provocations as single day units, compressions and extensions of narrative time, and/or abrupt shifts in time schemes within a text. Modernism considered time from as many angles as possible, like a crystal it kept turning and turning in its hand. With Henri Bergson, the philosopher most closely associated with many of modernism's formal experiments, and with the cultural history of time bursting open a period that featured everything from the assembly line to the implementation of standard time zones to the discovery of Relativity, it would seem that modernism is primed to give us great insights into time, as indeed it does. Critics have taken note; recent years have produced a plethora of important books and essays on time, including works by Paul Saint-Amour, Adam Barrows, Heather Love, Cóilín Parsons, Mary Dudziak, Wai-Chee Dimock, Dipesh Chakvarty, Susan Stanford Friedman, and many more.

The three recent books being reviewed here add notably to the rich conversation underway in modernist studies (and well beyond). They are distinguished, above all, by a powerful consciousness about the vitality of time as a subject, and by an impressive ability to assimilate a huge amount of thinking, reading, and writing on time into coherent and well-told narratives. Together, these books provide, almost, a compendium for the many ideas circulating among scholars thinking about literary time. Each is deeply researched, beautifully written, and fully engaged with time in historical contexts. Each offers the reader a wonderful, sometimes dizzying palette of temporal ideas, conundrums, dreams, and nightmares. Reading these books together offers a reminder of how ubiquitous and beguiling time is for writers and artists, and indeed for all of us. The sweep of topics illuminated here with respect to time is quite remarkable; at issue is everything from historical markers...