Present Tense A Poetics

by Avanessian, Armen; Hennig, Anke

• ISBN13: 9781628927641
• ISBN10: 162892764X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-09-24
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers – J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few – it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling.

For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

Author Biography

Armen Avanessian is a professor at the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at the Free University Berlin, Germany. He has been a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University (2011) and in the German Department at Yale University (2012). He is also editor of the book series SPEKULATIONEN and guest editor of the series Theories for the 21st Century. In 2012 he founded a research platform on Speculative Poetics, including a series of events, translations and publications: www.spekulative-poetik.de.

Anke Hennig is a Research Fellow in the Collaborative Research Centre 626 'Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits' and teaches at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at the Free University Berlin, Germany. She is the author of Sowjetische Kinodramaturgie. Konfliktlinien zwischen Literatur und Film in der Sowjetunion der 1930er Jahre, a media history of Soviet Cinematic Dramaturgy published in 2010.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Present Tense Novel
2. Readings in Method
3. The Imaginary Present Tense
4. Tense Philosophy
Epilogue: Why Poetics?
Glossary
Bibliography
Index