Chronic time, telling texts: forms of temporality in the eighteenth century【翻译】

ABSTRACT
Chronic Time, Telling Texts explores the coordinates of literature and time as they
reflect, reproduce, and resist each other in several canonical texts of the long eighteenth
century. In reading each text as a portrait of time, I employ an inductive approach that
posits historical and theoretical coherence within and across the four genres included in
this study. By this I mean that no single literary theory circulates throughout the thesis.
Each chapter rather appropriates the most equitable, if not the most productive, theoretical
approach in order to focus time as a literary construct and to understand how British
writers of the eighteenth century temporalized experience.
In my effort to explore the cultural motives of eighteenth-century constructions of
temporality, I begin by focusing on the earliest diurnal publication, The Spectator (1710). I
argue that The Spectator naturalized an experience of time that the periodical’s daily
distribution made collective, meaning subjective time became available through a
pronounced and unprecedented insistence on objective time. This paradigmatic shift in
temporality articulated a modern time-consciousness that served economic interests but
that also conditioned absence into a practice and timekeeping into a disorder.
In the second chapter, I explore how Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771)
signaled a revolt against the rationalized timekeeping of The Spectator. The novel’s formal
inventions, I argue, offered a subversive reading of time at odds with enlightenment
notions of progress and improvement. In doing so, The Man of Feeling disclosed a macabre
anxiety about time that compromised ideological commitments of sentiment by making
sympathy a bourgeois experience.
The third chapter focuses Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1741-45) as a complicated
measure of the journalistic impulse toward equivalence on the one hand, and as
sentimental resistance toward that equivalence on the other. I suggest that Clarissa clarifies
the difficulty of establishing temporal presence when the act of writing meant to record the
moment inadvertently casts the moment out, leaving both subjective and objective
2
measures of time inadequate to account either for time’s passage or for the subject’s
experience of it. Because Clarissa gains by losing what the poet of “Tintern Abbey” (1798)
seeks to relinquish—a self mediated by a time outside of its own consciousness—the fourth
chapter brings Wordsworth into focus and the century to a close. I provide close readings
of “Tintern Abbey” that question the autonomy of the subject when language is the only
access to temporal registers of the past, present, and future. I isolate several semantic,
grammatical, and adverbial subversions of temporality in “Tintern Abbey” that disclose a
linguistic resistance to time, memory, and meaning. In this resistance, recuperation
becomes indefatigably circuitous and returns us finally to the beginning, that is, to the fifth
and final chapter on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).
The many crises in constructions of eighteenth-century temporality that define the
first four chapters of this thesis are observable in Crusoe. The obsessive timekeeping I
locate in the early periodical is visible in Crusoe’s journal. The aesthetic of failed affect I
identify in Mackenzie’s novel is palpable in Crusoe’s alternation between sacred and
profane time. The lost moment and missing present of Clarissa is anticipated by Crusoe’s
repeated attempts to start the journal over. The linguistic resistance to time and meaning
of “Tintern Abbey” coincides with Crusoe’s inability to tell his story with any degree of
coherence. Because the episodic nature of Robinson Crusoe speaks to every text included in
this study, Chronic Time, Telling Texts concludes that Defoe established the modern text as a
kind of portal, an uncertain category of time and space for which the future is not quite
not yet and the past is not quite not there.
Abstract Approved: _______________________________
Thesis Supervisor
_______________________________
Title and Department
_______________________________
Date
CHRONIC TIME, TELLING TEXTS: FORMS OF TEMPORALITY
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
by
Christine A. Mazurkewycz
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2013
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Judith Pascoe
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
___________________________
PH.D. THESIS
____________
This is to certify that the Ph. D. thesis of
Christine A. Mazurkewycz
has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor
of Philosophy degree in English at the May 2013 graduation.
Thesis Committee: ______________________________
Judith Pascoe, Thesis Supervisor
______________________________
Eric Gidal
______________________________
Garrett Stewart
______________________________
Lori Branch
______________________________
Matthew Brown
ii
for Bill
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER ONE: TO BE CONTINUED: TIME AND THE SPECTATOR .................... 11
Equivalence ......................................................................................................... 14
The Immanence of Today .................................................................................. 18
The Imminence of Tomorrow ........................................................................... 23
The Return of “Whole Hours Together” .......................................................... 31
Conclusion.......................................................................................................... 39
CHAPTER TWO: THE ABSENCE OF MAN IN THE TIME OF FEELING:
MACKENZIE’S NOVEL SENTIMENT .......................................................... 43
Some Other Time ............................................................................................... 47
In the Quiet of Time .......................................................................................... 53
Fifteen Minutes and Three Miles to Noon........................................................ 60
Substitutes ........................................................................................................... 65
Introduction to Conclude .................................................................................. 69
CHAPTER THREE: CLARISSA: OR THE HISTORY OF AN ABANDONED
OBJECT .............................................................................................................. 73
Variables of Time .............................................................................................. 73
Two Sides to Every Letter ................................................................................... 77
Before, Between, and After ................................................................................ 80
Time Turning “O’er and O’er” .......................................................................... 84
Dating Clarissa .................................................................................................... 87
Reading Clarissa ................................................................................................. 92
Composition / Decomposition ......................................................................... 98
CHAPTER FOUR: “THEREFORE I AM STILL”: THE ONGOING POETICS OF
“TINTERN ABBEY” ........................................................................................ 101
In the Tradition de Mortuis ............................................................................... 103
The Now That Is No More .............................................................................. 112
Time on the Rise .............................................................................................. 119
No Body, No Poem .......................................................................................... 125
Conclusion........................................................................................................ 133
CHAPTER FIVE: ROBINSON CRUSOE: ADVENTURES IN TIME-WRITING ......... 138
Time and Story ................................................................................................. 139
The Future of Eternity...................................................................................... 143
Now, No More, Not Yet ................................................................................... 153
To Think That This Was All My Own ............................................................ 157
“What [Narrative] Need Had I?” ...................................................................... 161
Mortal Ends ...................................................................................................... 168
NOTES................................................................................................................................ 170
WORKS CITED...………………………………………………………………………………………………...177

原文地址：

http://www.hongfu951.info/file/resource-detail.do?id=859d2d73-d7d4-4631-a1a9-5c6ded1da5e1