Loading Events

Immediate Time

Amit Yahav, University of Minnesota

Thu, 2/13 · 4:30 pm6:00 pm · 100 Jones Hall

Department of French and Italian

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

Humanities Council Logo
Italian Studies Logo
American Studies Logo
Humanistic Studies Logo
Ancient World Logo
Canadian Studies Logo
ESC Logo
Journalism Logo
Linguistics Logo
Medieval Studies Logo
Renaissance Logo
Film Studies Logo