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.
Table of Content
Preface
Introduction
1. Time and the Modern
Baudelaire’s Discovery of the Present
How Long Does the Present Last?
2. Work on the Modern Myth of History
Transformations in the Idea of Progress
The Theory of Time Underlying Modern Historiography
Modernization Theory and Theories of Modernity
When Does the Modern Begin? Phases of Modernization in Western History
The Golden Door of the Future: Modernization as Culture (Using the Example of the United States)
3. Five Aspects of the Modern Temporal Regime
Temporal Rupture
The Fiction of Beginning
Creative Destruction
Destroying and Preserving: The Invention of the Historical
Acceleration
4. Concepts of Time in Late Modernity
Compensation Theory
Compensation Theory and Memory Theory: Two Different Approaches to the Past
5. Is Time out of Joint?
Total Recall: The Rhetoric of Catastrophe and the Broad Present
Connections between the Past, Present, and Future
6. The Past Is Not Past; or, On Repairing the Modern Time Regime
Three New Categories: Culture, Identity, Memory
The Past Is Not Past: Historical Wounds and the Idea of Reversible Time
Identity Politics: Intersections between History and Memory
Two Trends in the Politics of History
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
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.
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