Full Description
This book explores the conceptualization of time in early twentieth-century literature and thought, based on a transnational and translational model of literary history, focusing on Turkish, French and German literary traditions. Each from different cultural backgrounds, these modernists provide a radical critique of modern time regimes, which calibrate time in singular temporal narratives. The book traces the philosophical strand of this critical chronometry from Henri Bergson's theory of time, through Walter Benjamin's ambivalence towards decay of tradition, and finally to A.H. Tanpınar and Robert Walser's modernist fiction. Negotiating regionally marked concepts and topoi of temporality, it discusses networks of cultural circulations and maps a revised intersection of Turkish and Western European literary histories. It is an essential read for scholars and students of comparative and world literature, modernist studies, and cultural history.
Contents
Chapter 1.- Introduction.- Part I: Philosophy of Time.- Chapter 2- Bergson, The Politics of Time and Modernity.- Part II: Chronometrics in the Modern Capital: the City, the Past and Collective Memory.- Chapter 3 - Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's Istanbul.- Chapter 4- Chronometrics in the Modern Capital: Walter Benjamin's Fairytale.- Part III: The Literary Clock and Chronophobia.- Chapter 5 - Chronostasis: Temporal Disorders and the Critique of Managed Existence in The Time Regulation Institute.- Chapter 6- The Clockwork Language: Temporal and Linguistic Modernity in Robert Walser's The Assistant.- Chapter 7- Conclusion.
