Time and power: The social construction of time in modern fiction
Description
My dissertation addresses an issue central to British Modernism as I demonstrate that time in the modern British novel is rendered as a far more complex and much more socially oriented phenomenon than the traditional subject-centered Bergsonian model would allow. This model suggests time in modernism to be divided into two types: homogeneous, objective, public, clock-time and heterogeneous, subjective, private time. Moreover, according to this model, only the purely subjective aspect of human temporal experience has any significance for the modern novel, with objective, clock-time functioning as nothing more than an oppressive deterministic force from which the subject must escape. To deconstruct this reductive dualism, I use an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon literary theory, history, sociology, and philosophy to introduce a new conception of time which acknowledges the mutually constitutive interrelationship between the time of the self and the time of society and which posits time not as a disembodied subjective essence, but as a form of Foucauldian power Through close readings of novels by Conrad, Woolf, and James, I show that modern novelists respond in their fiction to the emergence of a new twentieth-century social time-consciousness, or what J. T. Fraser terms sociotemporality, by developing in their full complexity the intersubjective temporal relationships which characterize life in the modern world. In The Secret Agent, Conrad uses the Greenwich Observatory as the centerpiece for an examination of the temporal power relationships inherent to modern bureaucracies and the family as institution, as he shows how individuals must negotiate an infinite number of competing and often conflicting demands made on their time both in their public and private lives. Similarly, in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf structures her novel around the chimes of Big Ben, illustrating how even the most intensely individual subjective temporal worlds are nevertheless joined together through mutually shared public temporal experiences into a larger world of social time. Finally, I argue that in The Ambassadors James uses the introduction of advertising to the international watchmaking industry as a backdrop for his dramatic portrayal of the cultural shift to a standardized international time-keeping system