How contemporary novels use narrative time to counter cultural homogenization and historical flattening.
In From Empire to Anthropocene, Betty Joseph celebrates how contemporary fiction contributes to a novel framing of world literature by playing with our understanding of time. Bringing together an unusual constellation of writers-including Jamaica Kincaid, Teju Cole, Hari Kunzru, and Barbara Kingsolver-Joseph traces how the novelistic interplay of concrete and abstract temporalities offers a new theory of critical globality.
Joseph examines time in contemporary life through five conceptual metaphors that have captivated literary, critical, and cultural studies: specters, attachments, networks, markets, and assemblages. Joseph demonstrates how these terms are embedded with their own temporal structures and linguistic complexity. She develops a mode of reading that she calls "conceptual-metaphorical performances," which embody the writers'' complex chronop
