Literature and Temporality: Reading, Wri

In his classic essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” E.P. Thompson argued that the transition to industrial modernity in the decades around 1800 marked a shift in the very experience and “inward notion of time.” This graduate seminar will take the elasticity of time—in both its experience and its expression—as a starting point to explore a host of aesthetic, theoretical, and political questions related to temporality. While we’ll have one foot in the long Romantic period and the age of revolutions (the era Thompson discusses), the course will, as it only appropriate, range over time periods and milieus up to the present. The class will have a strong theoretical component, visiting a number of important theorist and paradigms (e.g., Marx, Benjamin, Wynter), but will also investigate literature as a distinct mode of telling time, with particular attention to poetry and drama. Conceptual terrain we might explore includes revolt and revolution, festivity and the ordinary, genre and history, work and slavery, collectivity and individuation, seasonality and ecology, and more.