Time Images: Alternative Temporalities in Twentieth-Century Theory, Literature, and Art
Author: Tyrus Miller
Date Of Publication: Sep 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-1258-0
Isbn: 1-4438-1258-7
The concept of “time-image,” this book argues, holds broad potential for the historical interpretation of cultural and aesthetic works. Many works that would not ordinarily be thought to be historical artifacts reveal their intrinsic historical character in light of this innovative interpretative concept.

The book’s first section,“Time-Images as Theory and Historiography,” considers alternative temporalities underlying historicizing theories and specific practices of history. Examples treated here include the notion of “retro-avantgardism,” works by the Frankfurt School on the interrelations of images and history, and Mass Observation’s dream documentation project.

The second section, “Time-Images in Modernist and Postmodernist Literature,” considers literary instances in which alternative notions of historical time are engaged. These include discussions of Wyndham Lewis and “cultural revolution,” Theodor Adorno’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s use of Antonio Gramsci in the practice of poetry and philology.

The third section, “Moving Images of Time,” discusses questions of cinema including children’s experience in films depicting traumatic historical events, the Quay Brothers’ animated adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s “Street of Crocodiles,” and Sergei Eisenstein’s and Charles Olson’s engagements in Mexico with pictographic representation, etymology, and archeological time.

Tyrus Miller is Professor of Literature at University of California at Santa Cruz. He is author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (U of California Press, 1999) and Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Northwestern UP, 2009) and editor of Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context (Central European UP, 2008).

"In Time Images, Tyrus Miller concentrates upon a topic of major significance for contemporary philosophy, art theory, aesthetics and cultural and visual studies . . . . He promotes a novel form of historiography, in which the phenomenological conflation of imagination and the fullness of lived experience is recognized as a pivotal feature of mental and material events."

--Aleš Erjavec, Institute of Philosophy, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Art

In Time Images, Tyrus Miller extends his investigations of artistic modernism into both the hinterlands and the underworld of the movement. He surveys the responses to modernism in Eastern and Central Europe and the phenomena of the “retro-avant garde,” analyzes the dialectic between temporality and historicity in Benjamin and Adorno, excavates the dreamworld of totalitarian regimes, and establishes the complex relations obtaining between art and politics in such liminal characters as Wyndham Lewis, Bruno Schulz, and Samuel Beckett. Miller knows what he is talking about, but he avoids “precocious narcissistic closure” in the treatments of his subjects. This is an important contribution to the current revisionist tendency in modernist studies, both well-informed and cool.

—Hayden White, Emeritus, University Professor of Historical Studies, University of California

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