Immediate Time

Immediate time is a category that recently seems to have attracted much attention. And, yet, what is it? This talk considers how an interest in “immediacy” developed in the eighteenth century as a solution to the challenge of grasping the intersections of time and timelessness. This challenge had often been tackled as a theological problem, but eighteenth-century thinkers also attended to it in aesthetic, moral, and political discourses. Artworks and philosophy rendered moments as absorptive durations at odds with common timekeeping. Moral treatises and novels explored a moral sense that may or may not operate instantaneously but always immerses in intensive durations. And political discussions speculated that our species’ fore-parents were immersed in presence, a prehistory that, these European conjectures contend, is approximated by indigenous peoples of remote lands. Far from doing away with mediation, these eighteenth-century engagements develop sophisticated and self-conscious narratives to mediate temporal experience.
Co-sponsored by the Department of English