Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time

This book explores the conceptualization of time in early twentieth-century literature and thought, based on a transnational and translational model of literary history, focusing on Turkish, French and German literary traditions. Each from different cultural backgrounds, these modernists provide a radical critique of modern time regimes, which calibrate time in singular temporal narratives. The book traces the philosophical strand of this critical chronometry from Henri Bergson’s theory of time, through Walter Benjamin’s ambivalence towards decay of tradition, and finally to A.H. Tanpinar and Robert Walser’s modernist fiction. Negotiating regionally marked concepts and topoi of temporality, it discusses networks of cultural circulations and maps a revised intersection of Turkish and Western European literary histories. It is an essential read for scholars and students of comparative and world literature, modernist studies, and cultural history. Özen Nergis Seçkin Dolcerocca is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bologna, Italy. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU and is the principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project ‘Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities’. Her research focuses on literary theory, comparative literature, modernism, nineteenth-century cultural history, narratology, and digital humanities.