Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination

Anne-Marie Evans, Kaley Kramer, Anne-Marie Evans, Kaley Kramer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030559601
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030559618
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Literature

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This collection offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space can shape literary narratives and forms. The essays consider the representation of a range of literary cities from across the world and consider how an understanding of time, and time passing, can impact on our understanding of the primary texts. Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. In this volume, the contributions demonstrate how literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time.

© The Author(s) 2021

A.-M. Evans, K. Kramer (eds.)Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination Literary Urban Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55961-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination

Anne-Marie Evans¹ and Kaley Kramer²

(1)

York St John University, York, UK

(2)

Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

Anne-Marie Evans (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Kaley Kramer

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. Literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time. Lieven Ameel’s contribution to The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space argues that the city novel is in part concerned with ‘measuring time’: ‘The spatial dimensions of the literary city are profoundly informed by temporal layers of meaning’ (2017, 233). Cities are, paradoxically, unified spaces of fractured chronologies experienced by individual citizens whose own ‘measures’ complicate any clear or authoritative reading of the space. In urban spaces time is regulated, marked, and organized by public and private citizens, by civic institutions, and by regulatory bodies. Public monuments connect the present with the past, memorializing a place and time that must be navigated both psychically and physically by inhabitants. The heterotopic space of cities also gives rise to pockets of resistant time, often associated with specific places: the park at night, the prison and legal courts, the rush hours of public transit and roads, the ad hoc creation of different time zones experienced through private rituals and community celebrations. The ‘working day’ that regulates infrastructure, even where it demarcates regular hours of labour from night-shifts and overtime, also functions in literary narratives: an awareness of ‘official’ time structures many urban narratives. Stories move from the beginning of the working day to the end; the protagonist can be understood in relation to the timely rituals of the eight-hour day: walking, cycling, commuting, being driven to work. In long forms of literature, time functions through duration. The city endures and it is endured in various ways by the astonishing variety of inhabitants, who respond to the city’s time-keeping rituals communally and privately in obedience to laws of civil jurisprudence and cultural tradition.

In Literature and the Peripheral City , Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch, and Markku Salmela argue that ‘the city has always occupied a special position amongst literary spaces’ (2015, 1). This collection interrogates the special place that time occupies in narratives set in and about cities. The ‘durability’ of the city—or of the citizens—signifies the ways in which time works in urban narratives. Whether it is the city that remains unchanged, as in the story of a character returning, transformed, after time away, or the city that changes too quickly, leaving behind individuals, communities, or neighbourhoods, time in the literary city is dynamic and plural. Durée interrupted by the new characterizes some of the complexity of the contemporary experience of urban time, particularly in the face of the emerging global city. Time zones—identified by cities across the world—telescope and collide through inter-urban travel: a neighbourhood in the same city may be more remote than another city due to the time it takes to travel there. Migrants from other cities might experience culture as well as jet-lag, in part because of the different divisions and accepted uses of time.

The essays in this collection explore cities both familiar (in literary manifestations) and ‘peripheral’. Ameel, Finch, and Salmela highlight the importance of ‘peripherality’ to literary urban studies as a key aspect of defining cities. In this collection, periphery is crucial to the narratives as a strategic way of distinguishing the central organizing ‘city’ from the subjective experience of the urban space. Peripheral space can be marked out by time in terms of how a given city is experienced by those not included in regulated time (under-employed and unemployed inhabitants, for example) as well as by the experience of places outside of such organized time (a shopping street after store hours, a parking garage at night). Memory, whether official or private, can also disrupt regulated time: a cenotaph in the centre of a busy square might afford a moment of reflection at the height of rush-hour; memorial parades or celebrations bring a halt to the flow of work, regardless of individual interest. Equally, the regulation of movement, of public transportation as well as the circulation of goods, services, and people, follows strict temporal regulation: parking, deliveries, ‘peak times’, ‘rush hours’ change the space and the use of space dramatically across a 24-hour frame. The imagined future of the city disrupts the present: scaffolding and temporary walls interrupt commuter routes, advertising through artists’ impressions a time after the upheaval when time and space will be rejoined.

Increasingly, these experiences reflect the majority of human experience. In 2018, 55% of the global population lived in cities; by 2050, this figure is predicted to rise to 68% (UNESCO 2018). This increase might suggest that urban experience is a contemporary concern; a history of literature, however, suggests that, at least imaginatively, narratives have focused on cities for centuries. Whether hellish (Milton’s ‘Pandemonium’) or paradisaical (More’s Utopia), cities are most often figured as a future space, an end-point of human history. In the Book of Revelations, it is the ‘new Jerusalem’ that descends, ‘prepared as a bride’ in the unfolding of the Apocalypse (Revelations 21:2). This poetically transfigured city is the divine dwelling place at the end of time, but cities in literature also contain and negotiate the experience of diverse ‘times’, from the work-a-day 9-to-5, with the experience of endless commutes, to the uncanny experience of living in a palimpsestic space that has seen centuries, if not millennia, of human habitation. Literary urban spaces reflect more than topography. They reflect and often refract a unique experience of urban time.

Jo Guldi argues that from 1880 to 1960, academic disciplines ‘reflected on our nature as beings situated in space’ (Guldi 2011 [2019]). This period coincides with radical changes to infrastructure in many Western cities, making way for increased public transportation as city planners worked in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The ‘spatial turn’ in academic discourse coincides with an increased interest in urban design and the study and regulation of human behaviour. For Edward Soja, the spatial turn responds to ‘a longstanding ontological and epistemological bias that privileged time over space in all the human sciences, including spatial disciplines like geography and architecture’ (1989, 4). Literature from this period intensified and extended previous modes and narratives that focused on the experience of ‘city life’, using the city as the catalyst for characters’ development and trajectory. Adam Barrows’s Time, Literature, and Cartography After the Spatial Turn: The Chronometric Imaginary (2016) argues that ‘literature is ideally suited to spatially conceptualize temporal experience, but that in doing so, narrative fiction can intervene meaningfully in the problems of mediating between locality and globality, place-based and planetary existence, and spatial conception and temporal transformation’ (2016, 2). This is no small claim. Barrows’s work is crucial to this discussion because he offers a geocritical analysis ‘for understanding the cartographic imaginary in literary narrative’ (2016, 2). By better understanding how to theorize the concept of time’s place in the ‘Spatial Turn’, Barrows reveals a more nuanced and sophisticated reading of literature’s role in reflecting and negotiating urban experience.

This collection seeks to develop and build on existing scholarship, exploring how literature structures and is structured by temporal experiences of urban spaces. The literary imagination has demonstrated for centuries that there are multiple ways of figuring and reconfiguring the city on the page. Mikail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopes remains an influence on many scholarly approaches to the literary city. Bakhtin ‘give[s] the name chronotope (literally, “time-space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin 1981, 4). This intersection ‘thickens’ time and ‘charges’ space, making both differently available for literary uses. For Bakhtin, time is the ‘primary category for literature’, but, in recent scholarship, attention has returned to the points of connection between time and space indicated through the term ‘chronotope’ as well as turning away from a Universalist experience of history (1981, 85). Bart Keunen’s Time and Imagination : Chronotopes in Western Narrative Culture (2011) uses a ‘cognitive-psychological approach’ to draw out Bakhtin’s concept and refigure the theoretical synthesis between narrative time and space. Moving on from Bakhtin’s insistence that the chronotope is essentially related to genre, Keunen argues that chronotopes are ‘cognitive strategies applied by specific readers and writers’ that rely on the already ‘existing, intertextual knowledge of the reader’ (2011, 1).

The relationship between the reader and the writer of urban novels adds another rich layer of complexity to the analysis in this collection. Urban novels reflect a sophisticated familiarity with city spaces. Richard Lehan’s The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (1998) argues that as urban spaces evolved, writers created new ways to articulate complicated civic experiences. Urban expansion, geographical location, and regional traits all contributed to new and different narratives reflected in literary modes and periods: ‘Comic and Romantic realism gave us insights into the commercial city; naturalism and modernism into the industrial city; and postmodernism into the postindustrial city’ (Lehan 1998, 289). Rather than a universal claim for human experience, Lehan’s focus on the difference that time afforded authors foregrounds the relationship between the historical position of the subject and their experience of the city.

Burton Pike’s The Image of the City in Modern Literature (1981) understands the urban space as a phenomenon that confounds perception and posits that the urban novel uses time and movement to shape experience. Pike argues for two main models of the city in literature: the city in stasis and the city in flux. The city in stasis accords with architectura...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination
• Part I. Time and Memory
• Part II. Time and Motion
• Part III. Time and Material Space
• Part IV. Time and Melancholy
• Back Matter