'In no time': representations of suspended time in contemporary literature

Thesis

In consciousness and literature, it is through narrative that meaning is habitually constructed, but in Anglo-American writing of the twenty-first century the relationship between time and meaning is studied, rather than routinely produced. Considering texts in which temporality is of explicit concern, my thesis interrogates how suspended time works at once in opposition and conjunction with narrative, as a being beyond meaning is explored. In representation, suspended time embeds the unseen, unknown, or unrealized within causality, and so forces texts too into suspension. Through metafiction, ekphrasis, intertextuality, and invocation, a lyric temporality is established within prose.

My first chapter reads works by Don DeLillo, Tom McCarthy, and Ben Lerner to consider how suspended time opens the narrativization that consciousness enforces, deferring closure in its recognition of the unknown. Pursuing the ethics to which these authors gesture, my second chapter explores the writing of Ali Smith, in which the plurality of time is consistently revealed through encounters with temporal absence or suspension. In Smith’s fiction individual perceptions of time are relativized; it is an affective mode of meaning-making that succeeds. Discussing works by Denise Riley, Joan Didion, Helen Macdonald, Max Porter and Yiyun Li, my final chapter explores the genre of grief writing, which, prominent within the current period, uncovers the affective potential of suspended time itself. Imagining a disjuncture from time that is shared, the atemporality of grief, and, indeed, of the literary, maintains for these writers the connection between the living and the dead.

Contributing to recent discussions of ‘the contemporary’ and of literature’s affective turn, my conclusion contends that in its representation of suspended time, twenty-first century writing enforces the detemporalization of its reader, promoting an affective mode of interpretation as it enables new ways of being in and being with time.

Authors: Cowtan, G

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-9eeqyyog9
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: contemporary literature; affect; time; suspended time
• Subjects: Affect (Psychology) in literature; Time; Contemporary, The, in literature