Chronotypes : the construction of time / edited by John Bender and David E. Wellbery.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Bender, John B.

Wellbery, David E.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Time.

Physical Description:

xi, 257 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1991.

Summary:

Time belongs to a handful of categories (like form, symbol, cause) that are genuinely transdisciplinary. Time touches every dimension of our being, every object of our attention -- including attention itself. It therefore can belong to no single field of study. Of course, this universalist view of time is not itself universal but rather is a product of the modern age, an age that conceived of itself as the "new" time. Time has thus gained new importance as a theme of general research with the "post-modern turn" now manifest in many areas of intellectual endeavor, especially in the humanities and social sciences.

"Chronotypes" are models or patterns through which time assumes practical or conceptual significance. Time is not given but (as the subtitle indicates) fabricated in an ongoing process. Chronotypes are themselves temporal and plural, constantly being made and remade at multiple individual, social, and cultural levels. They interact, they change over time, and they have histories, whose construal is itself an act of temporal construction.

This book -- an interdisciplinary collaboration of philosophers, historians, literary critics, and anthropologists -- examines the ways individuals, societies, and cultures make sense of time by constructing it in diverse patterns.

Contents:

Part I. Thinking Time

Time in Physical and Narrative Structure / Bastiaan C. van Fraassen 19

Time and Creation / Cornelius Castoriadis 38

Part II. Temporal Frames of Inquiry

A Slip in Time Saves Nine: Prestigious Origins Again / Jonathan Z. Smith 67

The Time of Telling and the Telling of Time in Written and Oral Cultures / Jack Goody 77

Part III. Time and the Politics of Criticism

Time and Timing: Law and History / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 99

The Temporality of Rhetoric / Dominick Lacapra 118

Part IV. The Temporal Order of Social Life

The Constitution of Human Life in Time / Thomas Luckmann 151

Synchronizing Individual Time, Family Time, and Historical Time / Tamara K. Hareven 167

Part V. Time, Narrative, and Cultural Contact

Of Dogs Alive, Birds Dead, and Time to Tell a Story / Johannes Fabian 185

La Fontaine and Wamimbi: The Anthropology of "Time-Present" as the Substructure of Historical Oration / David William Cohen 205.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-253) and index.

ISBN:

0804719101

0804719128

OCLC:

22909730