some loose ends

[Dave Monroe]

As mentioned--or, at any rate, implied, I realize I've
been orbiting with particular ellipticality here--at
the outset of VV(18), consternation over time, the
measurement, demarcation, standardization thereof, is
nigh unto constitutive not only of "modernism," but of
"modernity," in a "deep" sense ...  

Think, say, that Querelle des anciens et modernes; the
establishment of an absolute historical time in which
all events could be related; the invention and
increasing importance of mechanical clocks; analytical
calculus; the synchronization of mercantile,
diplomatic and military times; time/motion studies and
the indsutrialization of time; Henri Bergson and the
phenomenology of lived, experienced, interior,
whatever, time (and perhaps resitance to all of the
former, esp. in light of the latter. as a hallmark of
modernism?); cinema; see maybe here ...

Calinescu, Matei.  Five Faces of Modernity:
   Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitch,
   Postmodernism.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987.

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds.  Realism and Consensus
   in the English Novel.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton
   UP, 1986.

__________.  Sequel to History: Postmodernism
   and the Crisis of Representational Time.
   Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.

Heise, Ursula K.  Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative,
   and Postmodernism.  NY: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kern, Stephen.  The Culture of Time and Space,
   1880-1918.  Cambridge,MA: Harvard UP, 1986.

Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and
   the Making of the Modern World.  Cambridge, MA:
   Harvard UP, 1986.

Quinones, Ricardo J.  Mapping Literary Modernism:
   Time and Development.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton
   UP, 1985.

Wilcox, Donald J.  The Measure of Times Past:
   Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of
   Relative Time.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

And here's one I just stumbled across, but am not
familiar with ...

Schleifer, Ronald.  Modernism and Time: The Logic
   of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture,
   1880-1930.  New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.

"Postmodernism," perhaps, as response to new
exacerbations, exasperations?  Anyway, ongoing
interests of Pynchon's, apparently, esp.--or, at
least, most obviously--in Gravity's Rainbow and Mason
& Dixon.  And note the target of the anarchists in
Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent--the Greenwich
Observatory. Inspired by an actual event ...

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> Otto wrote:
> > 
> > I like what Thomas E. says about the "shift" from
> "epistemological to
> > ontological questions" in the, how shall I put
> this to end this
> > definition-discussion, postmodern department of
> Modernism.
> 
> This does not distinguish postmodernism from
> modernism. The
> shift is not made because it is a central part of
> Modernism
> and the Modernist's novels and poetry already. Read
> Eliot's
> Preludes for but one example.

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