Budapest: CEU Press, 2008 — 376 p. — ISBN-10: 9639776270; ISBN-13: 978-9639776272.The interconnections of time with historical thought and knowledge have come powerfully to the fore since the 1970s. An international group of scholars, from a range of fields including literary theory, history of ideas, cultural anthropology, philosophy, intellectual history and theology, philology, and musicology, address the matter of time and temporalities. The volume’s essays, divided into four main topical groups question critically the key problem of context, connecting it to the problem of time. Contexts, the essays suggest, are not timeless. Time and its contexts are only partly “given” to us: to the primordial donations of time and world correspond our epistemic, moral, and practical modes of receiving what has been granted. The notion of context may have radically different parameters in different historical, cultural, and disciplinary situations. Topics include the deep antiquity, and the timeless time of eternity, as well as formal philosophies of history and the forms of histories implicit in individual and community experience. The medium specific use of time and history are examined with regard to song, image, film, oral narration, and legal discourse.ContentsIntroduction. Tyrus MillerTemporality in the Long RunStefan Maul. Walking Backwards into the Future: The Conception of Time in the Ancient Near East;
Karen Bassi. Epic Remains: Seeing and Time in the Odyssey
Jonathan Beecher. Fourier and the Saint-Simonians on the Shape of History
Wai Chee Dimock. World History According to KatrinaHistorical Figures: Mediations, Citations, NarrationsRuth HaCohen. The Transfiguration of Proper and “Improper” Sounds from Christian to Jewish Environments
Britta Duelke. Quoting from the Past, or Dealing with Temporality
Richard Terdiman. Taking Time: Temporal Representations and Cultural Politics
Catherine Soussloff. Image-Times, Image-Histories, Image-Thinking
Bill Nichols. Documentary Reenactments: A Paradoxical Temporality That Is Not OneShapes of ModernityLászló Kontler. Time and Progress—Time as Progress: An Enlightened Sermon by William Robertson
Andrew Wegley. Religious Revivals: Modernity and Religion in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ and Richard Wright’s The Outsider
Lisa Rofel. Hetero-Temporalities of Post-Socialism
David Hoy. The Politics of Temporality—Heidegger, Bourdieu, Benjamin, Derrida“To the Planetarium”: From Cosmos to History and BackTyrus Miller. Eternity No More: Walter Benjamin on the Eternal Return
Karl Clausberg. A Microscope for Time: What Benjamin and Klages, Einstein and the Movies Owe to Distant Stars
