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Modernist Time Ecology

Texts pursue temporal innovation for many reasons. One is mimetic: some innovations aim to represent some real experience of time unavailable to conventional forms. Other innovations are dramatic ,i n texts that rearrange events for the sake of surprise, suspense or irony. The aesthetic motive is similar but its temporal experiments help create fine designs or fantastic worlds. And a fourth motivation is theoretical, driving texts that are speculative, metaphysical or metafictional. Mimetic innovations include explorations of the reality of time in the mind, the tempo of city life, the unfolding of critical events. Detective stories almost always entail dramatic inversions. So do texts that begin in medias res, though they often burst into action for aesthetic reasons as well. Theoretical time-schemes support speculation about time’s ontological conundrums or pattern themselves on counterfactual temporalities, which can be aesthetic too, especially if they are more playful than serious. I quickly sketch these four motives to contrast them with a fifth‐a temporal design I will call ecological. Ecological texts are pragmatic, but also visionary. Their project is to cultivate our temporal environment. They respond to perceived threats to the temporal manifold and model ways to conserve or enrich temporal possibilities, to reclaim the temporal landscape and husband its critical resources. And they do so while also saying so: ecological texts are exemplary tales of time’s restoration that speak to the ecological possibility while offering, in their aesthetic forms, the means to achieve it.