Temporal Experiments

Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature conducts an expansive exploration of different modes of timing. Its seven chapters pursue the question of time as it is embodied in key figures that shape both aesthetic and pragmatic life. Working closely with literary, visual, and musical artworks, the book aims to provoke new ways of engaging with the question of time. It treats artworks as experiments that launch temporal figures, and that test out the possibilities and connections these different figures enable. Thus, the book seizes upon works by artists like Anne Carson, King Tubby, and Raymond Queneau as opportunities for thinking through the valence of both existing and untested temporal configurations. What other modes of shaping time, it asks, might be conjured out of the viewing of an Omer Fast film, the reading of a poem by Baudelaire, or of a novel by Tom McCarthy? In treating artworks as temporal experiments, this book stresses the fact that artworks always experiment with the raw materials of time, fashioning it or refashioning it into novel combinations. This book follows the imperatives of these experiments in order to advance a nuanced understanding of the way time insinuates itself into all aspects of social and intellectual life.

Bruce Barnhart is an associate professor of American literature and culture at the University of Oslo. He is the author of Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture (2013). His work has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, and Novel. His latest publication is "LeRoi Jones, Jazz, and the Resonance of Class" (Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, 2020). His research interests include African American literature, post-Marxist theory, jazz, and Caribbean aesthetics.

Marit Grøtta is professor of comparative literature at the University of Oslo. Her latest book is Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media (2015), and her latest essay "At the Door of the Theater: Kafka's Oklahama Theater and the Nature Theater Movement" (New German Critique 142, 2021). Her research interests are 19th-century and modernist literature, visual culture, photography, temporality, aesthetic theory, and critical theory.