Reading And The Making Of Time In The Eighteenth Century
Download and Read Reading And The Making Of Time In The Eighteenth Century full books in PDF, ePUB, and Kindle. Read online free Reading And The Making Of Time In The Eighteenth Century ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Feeling Time
Author | : Amit S. Yahav |
Publisher | : University of Pennsylvania Press |
Total Pages | : 208 |
Release | : 2018-03-19 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 081229503X |
Download Feeling Time Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle
Literary historians have tended to associate the eighteenth century with the rise of the tyranny of the clockâthe notion of time as ruled by mechanical chronometry. The transition to standardized scheduling and time-discipline, the often-told story goes, inevitably results in modernity's time-keeper societies and the characterization of modern experience as qualitatively diminished. In Feeling Time, Amit Yahav challenges this narrative of the triumph of chronometry and the consequent impoverishment of individual experience. She explores the fascination eighteenth-century writers had with the mental and affective processes through which human beings come not only to know that time has passed but also to feel the durations they inhabit. Yahav begins by elucidating discussions by Locke and Hume that examine how humans come to know time, noting how these philosophers often consider not only knowledge but also experience. She then turns to novels by Richardson, Sterne, and Radcliffe, attending to the material dimensions of literary language to show how novelists shape the temporal experience of readers through their formal choices. Along the way, she considers a wide range of eighteenth-century aesthetic and moral treatises, finding that these identify the subjective experience of duration as the crux of pleasure and judgment, described more as patterned durational activity than as static state. Feeling Time highlights the temporal underpinnings of the eighteenth century's culture of sensibility, arguing that novelists have often drawn on the logic of musical composition to make their writing an especially effective tool for exploring time and for shaping durational experience.