Temporality in literature and film

This article proposes a quantitative game-theory model of Jane Austen's _Emma_ as a basis for arguing that free-market moral philosophy underwrites Austen's representation of matrimony and key formal elements of her writing – in particular, matters of verbal profusion, such as concision and pacing. Austen's famed stylistic "economy" is revealed to be structured by the emerging capitalist economy theorized by Adam Smith in _The Wealth of Nations_. Establishing the correspondences among several kinds of economy – quantitative, capitalist, verbal, temporal – the essay unites formal and economic approaches to Austen's work.

Winner of the INCS Stein.Essay Prize for best article published in 2018.

The paper demonstrates an attempt to comprehend on the example of A. Sokurov's cinematic work the relationship between the large-scale screen form (organization of a whole filmography and a separate film) and music as a prototype of the cinematic structure and a component of the audiovisual synthesis. This approach is provoked by the common intonation uniting all director' works and the principle of threading musical themes repeating from film to film, similar to the work of the musical leitmotif system. At the same time in the five-part picture «Spiritual Voices» (1995) a complex combination of a polyphonic temporal structure and archetype of a spiral form (in variants of archaic concentric form and classic sonata) is revealed. Both levels of the large-scale screen form obey in the director's work the universal principle of variations.

The different versions and rewrites of the Prose Roman d'Alexandre see the addition of two prologues and an epilogue. These additions expand the temporal perspective of the roman : from a linear biography of Alexander to a consideration of historical time, conceived as cycle, and a transposition on the divine plan. The temporality burst into the prose roman, a tool for mediation allowing the emergence of a new way of conceiving and telling the story. The new editor is thus part of this lineage of sages and astrologers, described in the first prologue, whose ability to merge three temporalities – past, present and future – is presented as a proof of erudition and nobility. The prose roman thus redoubled Alexander's continual preoccupation with posterity and the written record.

Les differentes versions et reecritures du roman d’Alexandre en prose voient l’ajout de deux prologues et d’un epilogue. Ces additions elargissent la perspective temporelle du roman, de la biographie, lineaire, d’Alexandre a une prise en compte du temps historique, concu comme cyclique, et a une transposition sur le plan divin. La temporalite fait irruption dans le roman avec la prose, outil de mediation permettant l'emergence d'une nouvelle facon de concevoir et de dire l'histoire. Le nouveau redacteur s’inscrit ainsi dans cette lignee de sages et d’astrologues, decrite dans le premier prologue, dont la capacite a fusionner trois temporalites, passe, present et avenir, est presentee comme un preuve d’erudition et de noblesse. Le roman redouble ainsi la preoccupation continuelle d’Alexandre pour la posterite et la trace ecrite.

Daniel Defoe's novels have long been studied as eighteenth-century novels of religious morality. These novels have frequently been seen as stories of sins, exploring the courses taken by the narrator-protagonists to repent and find physical and spiritual deliverance after being punished. Unlike these studies, this dissertation uses a recent theoretical framework in literary trauma studies to look at seven of Defoe's novels as first-person retrospective narrations of transgressions regarding familial obligations and to analyze the construction of fictional moral injury through stylistic techniques in the narrative. To do so, it uses Pederson's moral injury model to investigate filial, parental, and matrimonial transgressions and their ensuing moral injury. Three key arguments drive this research. Firstly, the theme of moral injury is not limited to recent narrative fiction, or to narrowly-defined trauma fiction. Secondly, a detailed analysis of these novels reveals that not every act of transgression causes moral injury because transgressors' personal moral values and abilities to contextualize these actions are principal factors in producing moral injury. Finally, the themes of literary texts (such as Defoe's recurring theme of transgressions and moral injury) can impact the form and style of that text (here in the case of temporal distortions, often supported by certain literary tropes). As a result of its thematic and textual analysis, this dissertation supports its arguments and reveals how the narrative structures in Defoe's novels are manipulated to represent these narrators' senses of shame and guilt and their ways of working through these feelings.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its broad popular success, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) has often been criticized as commoditized, co-opted countercultural filmmaking. Early film music critics such as Roy Prendergast, writing in 1977, simply repackaged these negative appraisals, viewing Burt Bacharach’s Oscar-winning pop score as a hyper-commercialized, aesthetically deficient contemporary anachronism, contrasted with the supposed universalism of more traditionally neo-Romantic Hollywood scoring. While more recent scholars such as Jeff Smith and Anahid Kassabian have opened up the historical phenomenon of the pop score to far more nuanced forms of industrial and aesthetic consideration, Bacharach’s score remains under-examined, despite its fascinating overlap of the pop score and the culturally vital film genre of the revisionist western.

This paper examines how Bacharach’s “anachronisms” actually do significant creative work, cannily balancing archaic and contemporary significations by blending together images of silent film music, pseudo-Baroque polyphony, ragtime revivalism, Latin jazz, and contemporary Brill-building pop. Bacharach’s score is thus in dialogue with its own historical traditions, displaying a form of self-consciousness that is specifically temporal in its nature. While its “cool” pop distanciation might be compared to various European New Wave tendencies in film music, its playful allusiveness draws to the surface a specifically “New Hollywood” tradition of subjecting the American past to critically self-aware forms of mythologization.

The aesthetics of myth, I argue, represent a productive lens through which to read the film and its soundtrack. Bacharach’s sampling of distinct, yet harmonious anachronisms grounds the film’s experiential sensibility in a poetic register resembling a mythic time-outside-time, dissolving together contemporaeity and historicity. Hearing mythic temporality as form of culturally embedded aural experience complements (and perhaps counter-balances) the potentially reductive tendencies of ideological readings that position myth as progressive or regressive cultural narrative—readings that have long dominated scholarship on the revisionist film western. While the category of myth has occasionally been applied in broader contexts to the interpretation of film music, it is specifically in the overlapping of myth and popular music that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid becomes recognizable as a particularly vital exercise in imagining the past.

E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1817 Gothic novella, 'Das öde Haus', and Gérard de Nerval's 1853 novella of personal reminiscence, 'Sylvie', may not at first sight seem obvious choices for comparison. But their presentations of deluded love disclose both the paradoxical approach to ‘marginality’ in the nineteenth century, and the inextricable conjunction of theme and form in narrative more generally. In these stories, the protagonists are given undiluted narrative authority. They are socially and literarily central figures who are drawn to the margins of society. Yet their modes of storytelling belie their pretentions of social ‘normality’. Both narrators transform the dimensions of time and space in their retrospective accounts of deluded infatuation. In so doing, they illustrate their own collusions in the creation of and identification with liminal figures. The novellas depict strikingly similar presentations of voyeurism, narcissism and fetishism, suggesting that ultimately it is the partial nature of the gaze that imbues the women with desirability. ‘Otherness’ becomes appealing as its unknowability allows the projection of the protagonists' own fantasies. As the mysteries are unveiled, desire evaporates. Marginality thus infiltrates theme and form in these novellas, while the narrators occupy an unstable space between centre and periphery.