Modernist Time Ecology

by Jesse Matz

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421426990
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	12/03/2018
Series:	Hopkins Studies in Modernism
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.02(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jesse Matz is the William P. Rice Professor of English at Kenyon College. He is the author of Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics and Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One. The Art of Time, Theory to Practice
Chapter Two. Modernist Time Ecology
Chapter Three. Bergson, Bakhtin, and the Ecological Chronotope
Chapter Four. Timescapes of Modernist Fiction
Chapter Five. Maurice in Time
Chapter Six. J. B. Priestley in the Theater of Time
Chapter Seven. Naipaul's Changing Times
Chapter Eight. Time Ecology Today
Chapter Nine. Film—Time Ecology
Chapter Ten. The Queer Prospect
Conclusion
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Vincent Sherry

Jesse Matz’s interpretive and discursive work are equally strong. He situates his thinking in a profound context of literary and critical history, taking long and recently established understandings of modernist time and reformulating these in ways that are at once careful and bold, exciting and exact. Modernist Time Ecology is a book of exceptional quality and value.

Michael W. Clune

An extraordinary, field-transforming book. Matz's great innovation is to change our sense of the force and meaning of modernist literary form. He gives us modernist literature as an arsenal in the war for time, an assemblage of means to resist the debasement of human time by modernity. Readers will be astonished by the boldness of his claims and procedures.

David Herman

This transformative contribution to modernist studies lucidly explores narratives that represent and cultivate ways of living with and in time. It thereby opens a whole new field of inquiry: investigating how stories can be used to model, through their formal design, strategies for solving the time-problems that they thematize.

Susan Stanford Friedman

After the spatial turn comes a return to time. Modernist Time Ecology is an invaluable rethinking of temporality through the metaphor of 'time ecology,' the study of time as an environment of its own. Matz rereads the time-crisis of modernity and aesthetic efforts of reparation in a creative range of writers and thinkers.

From the Publisher

An extraordinary, field—transforming book. Matz's great innovation is to change our sense of the force and meaning of modernist literary form. He gives us modernist literature as an arsenal in the war for time, an assemblage of means to resist the debasement of human time by modernity. Readers will be astonished by the boldness of his claims and procedures.
—Michael W. Clune, Case Western Reserve University, author of Writing Against Time

This transformative contribution to modernist studies lucidly explores narratives that represent and cultivate ways of living with and in time. It thereby opens a whole new field of inquiry: investigating how stories can be used to model, through their formal design, strategies for solving the time—problems that they thematize.
—David Herman, author of Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life

Jesse Matz’s interpretive and discursive work are equally strong. He situates his thinking in a profound context of literary and critical history, taking long and recently established understandings of modernist time and reformulating these in ways that are at once careful and bold, exciting and exact. Modernist Time Ecology is a book of exceptional quality and value.
—Vincent Sherry, Washington University in St. Louis, editor of The Cambridge History of Modernism

After the spatial turn comes a return to time. Modernist Time Ecology is an invaluable rethinking of temporality through the metaphor of 'time ecology,' the study of time as an environment of its own. Matz rereads the time—crisis of modernity and aesthetic efforts of reparation in a creative range of writers and thinkers.
—Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time

In Modernist Time Ecology, Jesse Matz combines sophisticated theorizing and insightful close reading to develop a brilliant case for the powerful effects of modernist aesthetic forms on the temporal environment. Matz gives new meaning to the old phrase 'practical criticism.'
—James Phelan, The Ohio State University, author of Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative

Modernist Time Ecology is a brilliant study, the most complete account we have of modernist engagements with time and their ongoing importance as reflections on and reparations of a changing culture. It is certainly an amazing collection of philosophical and critical concepts, but it gives these concepts a new vocation, to understand time in relation to the natural environment, and perhaps more importantly, as a natural environment. Jesse Matz is the perfect guide through this complex and wide—ranging material, which he elucidates with fascinating and profound new readings of modernist and contemporary narratives.
—Mark Currie, Queen Mary University of London, author of The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise

James Phelan

In Modernist Time Ecology, Jesse Matz combines sophisticated theorizing and insightful close reading to develop a brilliant case for the powerful effects of modernist aesthetic forms on the temporal environment. Matz gives new meaning to the old phrase 'practical criticism.'

Mark Currie

Modernist Time Ecology is a brilliant study, the most complete account we have of modernist engagements with time and their ongoing importance as reflections on and reparations of a changing culture. It is certainly an amazing collection of philosophical and critical concepts, but it gives these concepts a new vocation, to understand time in relation to the natural environment, and perhaps more importantly, as a natural environment. Jesse Matz is the perfect guide through this complex and wide-ranging material, which he elucidates with fascinating and profound new readings of modernist and contemporary narratives.