Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-2pzkn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-06T23:47:10.472Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Technique and the Time of Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jonathan Sachs  and
Andrew Piper
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

What time is it when we read? There are many answers to this question. Time might refer to a particular day of the week, as in Sunday reading, a practice that Christina Lupton finds has spanned both religious and secular contexts. Or time might imply a sense of pace, that reading is something we do quickly or slowly, which Rolf Engelsing suggests when he distinguishes between intensive and extensive reading. Or perhaps time is more periodic, an argument one finds in Deidre Lynch's work on nineteenth-century habitual reading or Christopher Cannon's work on medieval practices of rereading. Or time could be closer to an idea or topos, as in Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope like idyllic time. Finally, for someone like Gerard Genette the time of reading is fundamentally about anachronism, the nonlinear nature of narrative time.

Type
talks from the convention
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 5: Special Topic Cultures of Reading , October 2018 , pp. 1259 - 1267
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics”. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, by Bakhtin, edited by Holquist, Michael, translated by Caryl Emerson and Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981, pp. 84–258.Google Scholar
Bear, Laura. “Doubt, Conflict, Mediation: The Anthropology of Modern Time”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 20, no. S1, 2014, pp. 3–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Born, Georgina. “Making Time: Temporality, History, and the Cultural Object”. New Literary History, vol. 46, no. 3, 2015, pp. 361–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burney, Frances. Camilla; or, A Picture of Youth. London, 1796. A Celebration of Women Writers, digital.library.upenn.edu/women/burney/camilla/camilla.html.Google Scholar
Cannon, Christopher. “The Art of Rereading”. ELH, vol. 80, no. 2, 2013, pp. 401–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corngold, Stanley. Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature. Stanford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
Dubin, Nina L. Futures and Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert. Getty, 2010.Google Scholar
Engelsing, Rolf. Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800. Meltzler, 1974.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferris, Ina. “‘On the Borders of Oblivion’: Scott's Historical Novel and the Modern Time of the Remnant”. Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 4, 2009, pp. 473–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedrich, Annemarie, et al. “Situation Entity Types: Automatic Classification of Clause-Level Aspect.” Proceedings of the Fifty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 7–12 Aug. 2016, Berlin, pp. 1757–68.Google Scholar
Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. translated by Lewin, Jane E., Cornell UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Hartman, Geoffrey. Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787–1814. Harvard UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Heringman, Noah. Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology. Cornell UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Hutton, James. The Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations. Edinburgh, 1795.Google Scholar
Jaszczolt, K.M. Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality. Oxford UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Jordheim, Helge. “The Present of Enlightenment: Temporality and Mediation in Kant, Foucault, and Jean Paul”. This Is Enlightenment, edited by Siskin, Clifford and Warner, William, U of Chicago P, 2010, pp. 189–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, Wolfgang. “How Time Is Encoded”. The Expression of Time, edited by Klein, and Li, Ping, De Gruyter, 2009, pp. 39–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. translated by Tribe, Keith, MIT P, 1985.Google Scholar
Long, Hoyt, and So, Richard Jean. “Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism between Close Reading and Machine Learning.” Critical Inquiry, no. 42, Winter 2016, pp. 235–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lupton, Christina. “Immersing the Network in Time: From the Where to the When of Print Reading”. ELH, vol. 83, no. 2, 2016, pp. 299–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology. 1830–33. Edited by Secord, James, Penguin Books, 1997.Google Scholar
Lynch, Deidre. Loving Literature: A Cultural History. U of Chicago P, 2015.Google Scholar
Miller, Christopher. The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Robert. “Suspended Animation, Slow Time, and the Poetics of Trance”. PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 107–22.Google Scholar
Molesworth, Jesse. “Gothic Time, Sacred Time”. Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 1, 2014, pp. 29–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perovic, Sanja. The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics. Cambridge UP, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piper, Andrew. Enumerations: Data and Literary Study. U of Chicago P, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Purinton, Marjean. “Watches and Watching Time in British Romantic Comedy”. Wordsworth Circle, vol. 39, nos. 1–2, 2008, pp. 46–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. translated by Trejo-Mathys, Jonathan, Columbia UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenthal, Jesse. “Narrative against Data”. Genre, vol. 50, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rossi, Paolo. The Dark Abyss of Time. translated by Cochrane, Lydia, U of Chicago P, 1987.Google Scholar
Rudwick, Martin. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. U of Chicago P, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachs, Jonathan. The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism. Cambridge UP, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachs, Jonathan. “Slow Time.” PMLA, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. U of Chicago P, 1996.Google Scholar
Sussman, Charlotte. “Time Wandering: Problems of Witnessing in the Romantic-Era Novel”. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 43, no. 1, 2010, pp. 140–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Underwood, Ted. “Why Literary Time Is Measured in Minutes”. ELH, vol. 85, no. 2, 2018, pp. 341–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vendler, Zeno. “Verbs and Times”. The Philosophical Review, vol. 66, no. 2, 1957, pp. 143–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks”. Theory, Culture, and Society, vol. 30, no. 6, 2013, pp. 3–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wordsworth, William. “Preface”. Lyrical Ballads, by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Brett, R.L. and Jones, A.R., 2nd ed., Routledge, 1991, pp. 241–72.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. “Resolution and Independence”. Poems in Two Volumes, edited by Matlak, Richard, Broadview, 2015.Google Scholar
Zemka, Sue. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society. Cambridge UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar