Article published in «Daedalus» — 2003 —Vol. 132 — No. 2 (On Time, Spring) — pp. 86-97.
It's about time. All literature is about time. Yet concern with time in literature today is untimely. It comes at the wrong time. These two contradictory propositions should govern all contemporary reflection about time in literature. On the one hand, an enormous and continually augmenting secondary literature exists on the subject of time in literature. A search of the Modern Language Association of America's International Bibliography from 1963 to April of 2002 produces twenty-one pages of items for "time and literature." Some of these items are trivial or irrelevant, but many are on the mark. One example of the latter, of so many, is William Weitzel's "Memory, Stillness, and the Temporal Imagination in Yeats's 'The Wild Swans at Coole'" in the Yeats Eliot Review. On the other hand, the topic seems these days somewhat outmoded, old hat, vieux jeu. The most salient works in this area were published quite some time ago - among them Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man (1927), Georges Poulet's magisterial series of four critical books called Etudes sur le temps humain (1950 - 1968), A. A. Mendilow's Time and the Novel (1952), and, more recently, Paul Ricoeur's authoritative three-volume Temps et récit (Time and Narrative, 1983 - 1985). Indeed, explicit concern with time seems today a feature of a somewhat faded modernism, as in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (1913 -1927), Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (1924), Jorge Luis Borges's Nueva refutación del tiempo (1947), and Samuel Beckett's That Time (1976). In these days of focus on class, race, and gender, the subject would seem to many literary scholars far too abstract, artificial, philosophical, and formalistic to be worth pursuing. Time may nevertheless make a backdoor entry through the now ubiquitous topic of 'history'.
