In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Time and Narrative

A pioneering attempt to relate the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory of fiction, using fictions of apocalypse as a model. This pioneering exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conceptions of chaos and crisis offers many new insights into some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of a wide range of writers from Plato to William Burroughs, Kermode demonstrates how writers have persistently imposed their \"fictions\" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.

Frank Kermode and the Invented World@@@The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

We consider the problem of automatically inferring latent character types in a collection of 15,099 English novels published between 1700 and 1899. Unlike prior work in which character types are assumed responsible for probabilistically generating all text associated with a character, we introduce a model that employs multiple effects to account for the influence of extra-linguistic information (such as author). In an empirical evaluation, we find that this method leads to improved agreement with the preregistered judgments of a literary scholar, complementing the results of alternative models.

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A Bayesian Mixed Effects Model of Literary Character

The rhetoric of english India

ion, see Mieszkowski, Watching War, 144: “How can a diagram capture the horrific physical and emotional trials that compose the traumas of combat? Surely this is the fantasy of someone condemned to a perpetual childhood of waging wars with chessboards of various sizes and colors. In fact, war’s uniqueness among human endeavors has to do with the way in which it demands a new understanding of the concrete consequences that abstractions have in the physical world.” 68. Keegan, Face of Battle, 110.

War Pictures : Cinema, History, and Violence in Britain, 1939-1945

The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel

Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature

A vicious circle shapes much work on the problem of time in postmodern culture. Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and others trace a bad reciprocity between crisis in time and cultural crisis more generally: if postmodernity puts time in crisis, there can be no change, progress, or thinking otherwise; postmodernity redoubles, making more trouble for time. Lyotard, for example, defines “time today” as “controlled time” destructive to thought itself and therefore beyond rethinking, beyond repair (76). When Jameson notes that “the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize past and future into coherent experience,” he too means to locate a certain cultural incoherence beyond our capacities to resolve it (25). The “time-space compression” that defines but obscures postmodernity for Harvey largely has the same effect, which might be said to extend across the ages as well, with origins as early as what Richard Terdiman has called the “memory crisis” of post-revolutionary France and recent iterations as various as Antonio Negri’s critique of “totality without contradiction” (53), Richard Sennett’s account of “short-termism” (9), and James Gleick’s complaint against “the epoch of the nanosecond” and “the consequences of haste in our culture” (6, 13). These time-crisis theorists share the view that time is essentially a diversity of forms fatally vulnerable to the singularities of modernity. Human temporality ought to distinguish strongly but flexibly among past, present, and future, to pattern out all possible durations—to serve as a fully open and varied field of opportunity; but “time today” collapses the temporal manifold, sets only a given pace, and thereby limits possibility. Because it destroys any basis for real recourse—due, that is, to the reciprocity between time-crisis and crises in thought, memory, and experience—timecrisis theory tends to suggest that there is nothing to be done about it. Compare narrative theory: it reverses this vicious circle, arguing all the while that narrative engagement creates human time even as (or just because) modernity would destroy it. As early as Gotthold Lessing’s classification of literature as the “art of time,”

The Art of Time, Theory to Practice

https://digital.kenyon.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=english_publications

"You Must Join My Dead": E. M. Forster and the Death of the Novel

Whereas inquiries into the relationship between anti-imperialism and homosexuality rely too heavily on empirical evidence, E. M. Forster's 1909 lecture on Rudyard Kipling can help us discover a more conclusive theoretical interrelationship. Forster's lecture attributes Kipling's reputation to fantasies about a certain form of masculinity and proposes to celebrate instead a Kipling whose manliness is "amalgamated" with other qualities. Forster's better judgment in this regard is motivated by insight into the homoerotic primitivism that tends to glorify masculinity—insight in turn enabled by his homosexuality. As the lecture on Kipling finally develops an anti-imperial critique, we see how Forster's homosexuality entailed a postcolonial mindset. Further evidence linking homosexuality, "amalgamated" masculinity, and postcolonial politics, apparent after we have identified it in the lecture on Kipling, appears throughout Forster's fiction, from the early novels that also subject manhood to a process of amalgamation to later novels that stress the larger political implications of that process.

Jesse Matz

Papers

The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel

Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature

The Art of Time, Theory to Practice

"You Must Join My Dead": E. M. Forster and the Death of the Novel

Masculinity Amalgamated: Colonialism, Homosexuality, and Forster's Kipling