Is Time out of Joint?: On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime

Aleida Assmann

ISBN 10: 1501742434 / ISBN 13: 9781501742439

Published by Cornell University Press, 2020

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Is Time out of Joint?: On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501742434
• ISBN 13: 9781501742439
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 540 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future―and their relationship to the present―been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or as atavistic origin narratives rooted in nation, race, or tribe. The future, meanwhile, has lost its utopian glamor, with the belief in progress and hope for a better future eroded by fears of ecological collapse.

In this provocative book, Aleida Assmann argues that the apparently solid moorings of our temporal orientation have collapsed within the span of a generation. To understand this profound cultural crisis, she reconstructs the rise and fall of what she calls "time regime of modernity" that underpins notions of modernization and progress, a shared understanding that is now under threat. Is Time Out of Joint? assesses the deep change in the temporality of modern Western culture as it relates to our historical experience, historical theory, and our life-world of shared experience, explaining what we have both gained and lost during this profound transformation.

About the Author

Aleida Assmann was until 2014 Chair of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz. She is the author of several books that have been translated into English, including most recently, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. With her husband Jan, she was awarded the prestigious 2017 Balzan Prize for Collective Memory and the 2018 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

Sarah Clift is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Studies at the University of King's College, Halifax.