Time and temporality in Literature and other Arts - 5

6 Março 2018, 10:00 • Ângela Fernandes

Students presented literary texts, artworks or practices that take a central position in their PhD projects, and that would form the topic of their exam-papers for this part of the seminar. Students expounded on how they would analyse the presentation and role of time in the works presented, and received constructive guidance and feedback from the member of the teaching staff before setting out to write their papers. 

Time and temporality in Literature and other Arts - 4

5 Março 2018, 10:00 • Ângela Fernandes

We put our toolkit to work, paying attention especially to modernist and classic avant-garde visual artworks, poetry and prose, while to a lesser extent looking at performance and film. Our in-class analyses manifested how a plethora of unconventional and alternative ways of conceiving time and temporality, and by extension, history and historicity, lie dormant in the archive of the arts. This archive illustrates that ‘reading’ the arts for time might take us some way in escaping from our ‘contemporary’ crisis and possibly also in thinking of (and doing) art and literary history differently.

Time and temporality in Literature and other Arts - 3

2 Março 2018, 10:00 • Ângela Fernandes

We first revisited key figures in 20^th-century philosophy, aesthetics and art, film, photography and literary studies to canvas existent views of time’s presentation and role in the arts. Building on their insights, and on the back of the attention paid in previous days to the key role of external time-measuring and -keeping instruments that shape our shared cultural conception(s) and experience(s) of time, we decided to also look at artworks as additional ‘prostheses’ of time. Through a discussion of more contemporary approaches we devised a conceptual ‘toolkit’ with which to analyse works (from all the arts) as such alternative time-keeping and measuring instruments.

Time and temporality in Literature and other Arts - 2

1 Março 2018, 10:00 • Ângela Fernandes

We broadened the arena and looked at how in different disciplines (psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, physics and [analytical] philosophy) time is currently being studied. We arrived at the conclusion that ‘time’ is not a unified object of discourse, and that perhaps the most productive way of looking at it is as a culturally situated construction. From this perspective alternative conceptions and experiential templates of time, perhaps leaving conventions behind, could be, and perhaps already have been, fleshed out as well. Rather than to look exclusively at contemporary art, we therefore also decided to look at the arts in other periods, homing in especially on the modernist period, as it coincided with a phase in cultural history that is often said to have witnessed a modern ‘time crisis’ akin to our present-day one.

Time and temporality in Literature and other Arts - 1

28 Fevereiro 2018, 10:00 • Ângela Fernandes

We first looked at the ways in which historians and cultural analysts today often highlight how Western culture seems to immerse itself completely in a ‘presentist’ frame of reference in which both the past and the future are made subservient to the now, and in which a whole battery of external time-measuring and –keeping instruments and technologies (clocks, timetables, timelines, smartphones, etc.) seems to prevent people from escaping this predicament. This observation in recent years went hand in glove with a rising interest in the issue of ‘contemporaneity’.

In the second part we looked closer at some theorists and art historians working on the contemporary to conclude that in a variety of ways these scholars are looking, through contemporary artistic practices, for alternative manners in which to reconceive (the experience of) time today so as to escape from the current, narrowly ‘presentist’ scope of Western culture.