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.