Shapes of Time

History and Eschatology in the Modernist Imagination

Michael McGillen

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781501772818
• eBook ISBN: 9781501772832
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shapes of Time explores how concepts of time and history were spatialized in early twentieth-century German thought. Michael McGillen locates efforts in German modernism to conceive of alternative shapes of time—beyond those of historicism and nineteenth-century philosophies of history—at the boundary between secular and theological discourses. By analyzing canonical works of German modernism—those of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musil—he identifies the ways in which spatial imagery and metaphors were employed to both separate the end of history from a narrative framework and to map the liminal relation between history and eschatology.

Drawing on theories and practices as disparate as constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, photography, and urban architecture, Shapes of Time presents original connections between modernism, theology, and mathematics as played out within the canon of twentieth-century German letters. Concepts of temporal and spatial form, McGillen contends, contribute to the understanding not only of modernist literature but also of larger theoretical concerns within modern cultural and intellectual history.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Constructivism, Mathematics, and the Space of History
• 2. The Eschatological Limit: Spatial Form in Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology
• 3. The Arc of History: Franz Rosenzweig’s Figures of Time and Eternity
• 4. Temporal Exterritoriality: Siegfried Kracauer and the Shape of History
• 5. Images without End: Robert Musil’s Narrative Ruptures
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index