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"Is, as Hamlet once feared, the time out of joint? What has happened to our relation to the past and the future? The past has returned in various shapes: as nostalgia, as traumatic impact, and as historical origin or key event for the purposes of nation building. The future, meanwhile, has lost much of its glamor, too. The notion of progress and a utopian future have been eroded a growing ecological crisis. The seemingly solid moorings of our temporal orientation have collapsed within the time span of a generation. In order to better understand our temporal crisis, we must start by reconstructing what has just disappeared. In this book, Aleida Assmann tracks the rise and fall of what she calls "the time regime of modernity," explaining what we have both gained and lost in this profound transformation of our cultural values and premises"--
List of contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Time and the Modern
Baudelaire's Discovery of the Present
How Long Does the Present Last?
2. Work on the Modern Myth of History
Transformations in the Idea of Progress
The Theory of Time Underlying Modern Historiography
Modernization Theory and Theories of Modernity
When Does the Modern Begin? Phases of Modernization in Western History
The Golden Door of the Future: Modernization as Culture (Using the Example of the United States)
3. Five Aspects of the Modern Temporal Regime
Temporal Rupture
The Fiction of Beginning
Creative Destruction
Destroying and Preserving: The Invention of the Historical
Acceleration
4. Concepts of Time in Late Modernity
Compensation Theory
Compensation Theory and Memory Theory: Two Different Approaches to the Past
5. Is Time out of Joint?
Total Recall: The Rhetoric of Catastrophe and the Broad Present
Connections between the Past, Present, and Future
6. The Past Is Not Past; or, On Repairing the Modern Time Regime
Three New Categories: Culture, Identity, Memory
The Past Is Not Past: Historical Wounds and the Idea of Reversible Time
Identity Politics: Intersections between History and Memory
Two Trends in the Politics of History
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Aleida Assmann was until 2014 Chair of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz. She is the author of several books that have been translated into English, including most recently,
Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. With her husband Jan, she was awarded the prestigious 2017 Balzan Prize for Collective Memory and the 2018 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
Sarah Clift is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Studies at the University of King's College, Halifax.
Summary
Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future—and their relationship to the present—been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or as atavistic origin narratives rooted in nation, race, or tribe. The future, meanwhile, has...
